TROIS-RIVIÈRES, Quebec — The Ottawa Senators and Montreal Canadiens are meeting at 7 p.m. ET on September 21 at Colisée Vidéotron for Kraft Hockeyville’s 20th-anniversary NHL preseason game.
The matchup revisits the program’s inaugural game, played in Truro, Nova Scotia, on September 25, 2006, when Montreal defeated Ottawa 7–3. The Senators and Canadiens are the only NHL franchises to have appeared in Kraft Hockeyville twice, bookending two decades of community-rink investment by the NHL and Kraft Heinz Canada.
Saint-Boniface, Quebec, the 2025 Kraft Hockeyville winner, received $250,000 in arena upgrades.
The Kraft Hockeyville program asks Canadians to vote for their hometown rink. The winning community receives $250,000 in arena upgrades and a professional NHL preseason game — the kind of spectacle that most small towns only see on a television bolted to a dressing room wall. Since 2006, according to NHL.com, the program has channeled more than $5 million to local arenas across Canada.
This year’s winner is Saint-Boniface, a community in Quebec. Its Aréna de Saint-Boniface will receive the full renovation prize, plus $10,000 in youth hockey equipment donated through the NHLPA Goals and Dreams fund, NHLPA.com reported. Tonight’s game is played at the nearby Colisée Vidéotron in Trois-Rivières for capacity and broadcast requirements, but the real recipient is the smaller community down the road.
That pipeline from the big rink to the small one is what Kraft Hockeyville has always been selling. Two decades in, the case is easier to make.
The Montreal Canadiens have staked the next several seasons on Martin St-Louis’s patient rebuild. Cole Caufield has become the franchise centerpiece, and Juraj Slafkovsky has grown into the top-six winger that everyone in Montreal hoped the 2022 first overall pick would become. The Canadiens are projected to make the playoffs for a second consecutive season. Whether any of that shows up in a preseason game in Trois-Rivières is beside the point. What shows up is the crest.
There is something specific about what happens to a building when those two crests appear on the same ice in a small Canadian city. The Ottawa-Montreal rivalry runs along historical, cultural, and geographic fault lines that feel disproportionate for the market-size gap between the two cities. The crowd at Colisée Vidéotron tonight will be loud in a way that the Bell Centre and Canadian Tire Centre usually dilute with their size.
That is what Kraft Hockeyville figured out in Truro, and what it has refined every fall since: scale down, and the intensity scales up.
As Yahoo Sports noted, neither franchise could have anticipated in 2006 that the anniversary would bring them back together. The NHL has not been shy about the milestone. Kraft Heinz Canada has renewed its title sponsorship through 2028, and voting for next year’s winning community opens in November.
The unresolved question, as it always is on a night like this, is whether any of it changes what happens when the real season begins. NHL coaches parse preseason games carefully — veterans get early ice time and early rest, prospects audition, and nobody wants an injury in September. For the Senators and Canadiens, the 82-game season is still weeks away.
As the NBA opens its preseason overseas with Cooper Flagg and Kevin Durant in Macao, the NHL is making a quieter argument about where its roots lie — not in international markets, but in a mid-sized Quebec city chosen because a smaller one nearby won a community vote.
For Saint-Boniface, the real season begins when the renovation check clears. For everyone in Trois-Rivières tonight, it begins at 7 p.m.
