We Are the Senators

Lore & Background

The story of the Ottawa Senators is, at its root, a story about a small city refusing to let go of its hockey. The club was founded in 1883 as the Ottawa Silver Seven, a group of players drawing from the political and social establishment of the young capital. Within a few years they were simply the Ottawa Senators, a name that welded the team to the identity of the city — the seat of the Senate, the centre of a young nation. When the NHL was formed in 1917, Ottawa was one of the four founding franchises, and the early decades produced a string of Stanley Cup runs and a rivalry with Montreal that still echoes in the stands today.

Then came the long silence. The franchise left the NHL in 1934 and did not return until the 1992–93 season. For a generation, Ottawa's hockey identity lived in memory, in old photographs, in the stories grandfathers told at kitchen tables. The return was almost miraculous: the new Senators, in their very first season back in the league, won the Stanley Cup in 1993. The second came in 2007, a gritty, underdog run that felt like the city finally exhaling after decades of holding its breath.

"We Are the Senators" is not a slogan printed on a banner. It is a generational inheritance. The fans who filled the Civic Centre in the 1960s and 70s, the ones who sat through the empty years, the ones who bought season tickets in 1992 on faith — they are the same community that now packs the Canadian Tire Centre. The chant is a lineage claim: we were here when the team was gone, we were here when it came back, and the ice belongs to us.

In Their Own Story

The November air outside the Canadian Tire Centre is the kind that bites through a jacket and makes your breath a small white flag. Inside, the building is already a living thing — the rumble of ten thousand voices layered over the scrape of Zamboni steel on fresh ice, the thump of a bass line from the PA, the particular Ottawa way of arguing with a stranger about whether a call was right. A kid in a too-big red jersey presses her face to the glass in the lower bowl, watching a goalie pull a puck from the corner with one hand, and she does not cheer. She *roars*, the way her grandfather used to in the Civic Centre, the way her grandmother's mother probably did in the old arena. The player on the ice looks up, finds the glass, finds the kid, and raises a stick in a small salute. No one in the building will ever know the exchange. No one needs to. The kid will remember it for the rest of her life, and she will tell her own children, and they will say, *We are the Senators*, and it will be true in the only way that matters — because it has always been true, in this city, in this building, in this long and stubborn love.

Reader's Guide

The Canadian Tire Centre, nestled in the suburb of Kanata just west of downtown Ottawa, is a modern NHL arena that opened in 1996 to replace the beloved Ottawa Civic Centre. The building seats roughly 19,000, with a steep lower bowl that puts fans close to the ice and an upper deck that creates a natural amphitheatre effect. The ice-level seating, the end-zone bars, and the concourse-level viewing areas give the venue a dense, intimate feel despite its size. The red-and-black colour scheme is woven throughout: the seating, the signage, the team crest projected on the ice at warmups.

Game-day rituals are deeply embedded. Before the first faceoff, the crowd swells into the "We Are the Senators" chant, a call-and-response that builds in waves from the lower bowl upward. Goal celebrations are explosive and unscripted — the entire end zone erupts, strangers hug, and the PA announcer's voice is nearly swallowed by the roar. The team's connection to Ottawa's civic identity is constant: the arena sits in a city where government, history, and hockey are inseparable, and the Senators are woven into the fabric of local life the way few teams are in their markets. Season tickets are passed down through families, the team's colours appear on local storefronts year-round, and the rivalry with Montreal is treated less as a sporting event and more as a civic obligation. The Senators are not a product Ottawa consumes; they are a part of what Ottawa is.

Did You Know?

• The Ottawa Hockey Club, founded in 1883, is one of the oldest continuously traceable professional hockey organizations in North America, predating the NHL by more than three decades.
• When the Senators returned to the NHL for the 1992–93 season after a 57-year absence, they won the Stanley Cup in that very first year back.
• The Ottawa Civic Centre, the team's home from 1961 to 1996, was one of the oldest arenas in the NHL and was known for its creaky wooden floors and intimate, rowdy atmosphere.
• Ottawa was one of only four franchises — alongside Montreal, Toronto, and Quebec — to form the NHL in 1917, making the Senators part of the league's original DNA.