‘A dream come true’: Benoit Pouliot

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It’s the type of news that any mother longs to hear.

For Diane Pouliot, it happened on an otherwise regular Monday afternoon, last November 23, when there suddenly came a phone call from her youngest son, Hugo, at her office.

“He says, ‘Mom, did you hear the news? Ben’s coming to Montreal,'” recalls the mother of three, reliving the moment over a cup of coffee last week. “Well, I start to scream and, while talking to him, my cell phone rings… and it’s Benoit.”

And as his plane landed at Montreal’s Trudeau airport the following day, so began the homecoming journey of Benoit Pouliot – until that moment, perhaps best known as the fourth-overall NHL draft pick in 2005 and an Eastern Ontario native who played for the Minnesota Wild.

A professional hockey player, by all standards, yet the 23-year-old from St-Isidore was one virtually unknown in the place that proudly refers to itself as the “city of hockey.” For, as anyone who grew up reading Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater can attest to, until you’re wearing the colours of bleu-blanc-rouge and the CH logo on your jersey, you aren’t really playing the game.