But if there’s any sense of frustration that they are associated overwhelmingly with one thing, neither shows any sign of it. ‘Blue is beautiful! You look good!’ ”Ĭohen has made six other films and a long list of children’s books, while Carrier is responsible for one of the iconic works of Quebec theatre, La Guerre, Yes Sir!, and a many other works in all genres, including the new history book Montcalm and Wolfe (HarperCollins, 336 pp, $21.95). I had a red sweater before, and now I had a blue one. And, of course, she didn’t know about hockey, it was a different world to her. “She didn’t have much time to be sensitive. One question this particular reader has always wanted to ask Carrier is this: How could his mother have done that to him? Was she really completely insensitive to the implications of sending her son out to the village rink dressed as a Maple Leaf? He asked for some copies of the film to show to his children.” More pleasing to Carrier, you sense, was the response of Maurice Richard himself, who attended the film’s Montreal première. “I got an email about a pastor who used the story to tell his faithful to follow him because they needed a strong leader.” “It has been used all kinds of ways,” he said with a shrug. With its depiction of a rural Quebec still very much inward-looking and under the sway of the church, The Hockey Sweater has always been tempting to read as political allegory Carrier, for his part, has long since accepted that the “meaning” of his story is up to its audience. “‘My daughter is getting married and I want her to have three kids,’ ” he recalled one mother saying as she presented him with three copies of the book, to be inscribed to #1, #2 and #3 respectively. “A lady was telling me that her father had died and she was called to the hospital to pick up his stuff, and there was his wallet, a bit of money, and a copy of The Hockey Sweater.” More than once, Carrier has been asked to sign the book for people yet to be born.

“Still almost every day there is something,” said Carrier of the ongoing response from readers. Photo by Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette Roch Carrier, right, author of The Hockey Sweater, and the book’s illustrator, Sheldon Cohen, talk about the 30th anniversary of this Canadian classic on Wednesday, Nov, 19, 2014, in Montreal.

Talking with Carrier and the 65-year-old Cohen together last week, there was a palpable sense of two artists amazed, even perhaps a bit dazed, at the journey one very short story has taken them on.

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