A Memorial Cup, two President’s Cups and, unless the team delivers another miracle this spring, four final appearances in 27 seasons. It’s quite a legacy, without forgetting a ton of good memories, that the Acadie-Bathurst Titan will leave in the minds of the population when he leaves the K.-C.-Irving Regional Center for good at the end of this season.
Even though everyone had been expecting it for a long time, the confirmation that the team was likely to move its home to the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador in time for the next campaign caused quite a stir on Monday .
We still have to use the conditional since the announcement is not official, but that would seem to be just a formality. At least that’s what journalist Stéphane Leroux, from the Réseau des Sports (RDS), says, who was the first to make the announcement on Monday morning.
In a few days, a few weeks at most, the Titan will officially pass into other hands and it will play what remains of the regular schedule before closing a large part of the sporting history of the city of Bathurst.
According to figures circulating here and there, the team was sold for around $6 million.
Since the 2008-2009 season, when Léo-Guy Morrissette was still the owner of the club, the Titan was no longer able to regularly attract crowds of more than 2,000 spectators.
In fact, aside from the 2018 playoffs that led to winning the President Cup and Memorial Cup, the Titan hasn’t been able to convince people to go through the turnstiles often. Since the 2008-2009 season, of the 523 games presented at the K.-C.-Irving Regional Center, only 34 times has the team attracted more than 2,500 spectators. And during the 44 playoff games since the spring of 2009, 17 times have the Titan convinced more than 2,000 people to come and cheer them on, including the 10 duels in the 2018 playoffs.
There have also been only 12 full houses (3,524) since the 2006-2007 season, including six during the 2018 playoffs. The last full house dates back to the last game of the 2018-2019 regular season.
That said, the difficulties of the last 15 years in filling the K.-C.-Irving Regional Center will not succeed in making us forget what matters most, the memories. And there are many of them.
Starting with the transactions that allowed the Titan to obtain Roberto Luongo, Mathieu Benoit, Ramzi Abid and Marc Bouchard in December 1998, the hundreds of fans who slept under the stars to ensure they had tickets for the 1999 playoff matches, Marc Bouchard’s winning goal to win the President’s Cup that same spring, the arrival of Charline Labonté, Mathieu’s eight goals and two assists Benoit against Chicoutimi on November 14, 1999, Jonathan Ferland’s six goals and two assists against Rimouski on September 27, 2002, most of Jonathan Tremblay’s fights between 2002 and 2004, Thomas Beauregard’s 71 goals thanks to Mathieu Perreault’s skilful passes in 2006-2007, the conquest of the 2018 President’s Cup and the celebrations which followed that of the Memorial Cup in the streets of the municipality shortly after.
And what about the checks by Jules-Edy Laraque, the skating of Jonathan Girard, the domination of the trio composed of Ferland, Olivier Filion and Janis Sprukts, the miracles of Luongo and Adam Russo in front of the net, the only season of Patrice Bergeron, the talent of Noah Dobson, the leadership and inspired play of Jeffrey Viel and much more.
In the absence of having a club to encourage, there will at least be all these memories to remember.
