Carey Price will be at the Montreal Canadiens’ season opener on Wednesday night and a full house of fans at the Bell Centre will get a chance to let their franchise player know how they feel about him, how much they’ve missed him. It will undoubtedly be a special moment.
But it will also be a difficult one for the man receiving that adulation because he would much rather be in uniform with his teammates than standing in street clothes.
Price was on the road when he took our call Tuesday morning, en route to a farm in Granby, where he planned on spending the day hunting white-tailed deer.
This is one of Price’s happy places. Another one is at home with his family. And yet another one is being on the ice with his teammates, where the Canadiens were Tuesday preparing for their season opener against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Wednesday night while Price was driving away from the city, away from them.
The fact Price can’t be in one of his happy places right now led him to another happy place, hunting in the wild. This came after he spent a week in western Alberta, spending time with his father, Jerry, and that side of his family, also in the wild, also doing some hunting, as Canadiens training camp was hitting its second week back in Montreal.
“I just wanted to keep my brain busy while training camp was going on,” Price told The Athletic on Tuesday from somewhere within the 80 kilometres separating Montreal and Granby.
Training camp going on and Price not being a part of it remains difficult for him, and it is a situation that does not appear to have an easy resolution.