The QMJHL Arena Guide - Arena Salaberry, Verdun Collège Français

The QMJHL's website is a brilliant and maddening one. The league has posted all of their gamesheets online dating back to the league's founding, which enabled a bored completist to go through it on a boring afternoon back in 2009 and discover, to his horror, that the Verdun Collège Français played one lousy game at something called the "CEGEP de Valleyfield" back in November of 1993. One small problem, though: the CEGEP de Valleyfield is an educational institution, and a hockey arena with spectator seating does not appear to be one of the school's particular assets.

So, following an embarrassing amount of research, I eventually concluded that our mystery building was the Arena Salaberry, in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, Quebec. Why the Verdun College Francais chose to play one game at a tiny arena in a town nearly an hour's drive west of Verdun remains a mystery, but no matter - the Q played a game at the Arena Salaberry in 1993, which meant that the next time I was back in Montreal, I had to visit.

What I found, a mere five years after discovering the oversight, was a new arena built on top of an old one. Interestingly, when the original 1930's superstructure was about ready to fall down on itself like the rest of Quebec's aging infrastructure, the town of Salaberry-de-Valleyfield kept the original ice surface and seating bowl intact and demolished the rest of the building. Then, they built a new structure around the old ice and seating. What stands today on the site is an arena with modern amenities, dressing rooms, and a new upper deck, but still has three rows of ancient seats surrounding the ice surface. It kind of sort of feels like an old building, particularly when you're sat in a battered old wooden seat.

So kudos, city of Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, for maintaining the old while building new around it, and let us hope the QMJHL's website does not hold any future grand surprises that would necessitate another trip to Montreal for no other reason.