All aboard!

>> Captain Tracey Kelusky hopes Montrealers will catch the lacrosse Express

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

VENOR

Is Montreal a good sports town? Depends. Baseball’s all but dead, the Alouettes are licking their wounds from their abysmal finish last year and the Habs are limping along, but the new sport in town, lacrosse, is getting a warm welcome. A winning team in the Molson Centre? Here’s to hoping.
At the November 29 home opener, the Express, a first-year expansion team, stomped the (also expansion) Calgary Roughnecks before 7,500-plus enthusiastic fans. Led by 26-year-old captain Tracey Kelusky, the Express now have an impressive 3–1 record, with their next game at the Molson Centre on January 11.
“I love playing at the Molson Centre,” Kelusky says. “You look up and see all the banners, the tradition of the Montreal Canadiens, you see the retired jerseys. One of these years we’ll get a banner of our own up there.”
The Peterborough, Ontario, native will be moving to Montreal this month, and hopes that the Express will become both a long-term franchise and a welcome member of the community. The glitch, though, lies with the vast majority of the team living in and around Toronto.
“Most of the guys play part-time and have jobs from Monday to Friday,” he says. “We practice at the Maple Leaf Gardens on Tuesdays and weekends, and then hop up to Montreal for a Friday night game. But in a heartbeat these guys would move to Montreal and make lacrosse a full-time thing.”
And that healthy Toronto-Montreal rivalry? Oh, it’s there. “Toronto will become one of our biggest rivals because they were the champs for two years in a row and made it to the championship last year. A lot of the guys are east-coast based, and some of them were there last year but didn’t play enough, because of politics or whatever. So it’s going to be an interesting match-up to say the least,” he says. “We’ll be there to prove a point.” :