History
The original Nationals were founded in 1973 to replace the Hull Festivals who had just left the Central Junior A Hockey League for the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. In just three season the Nationals, coached by Bryan Murray, won the league, the Dudley Hewitt Cup as Central Canadian champions, and the Centennial Cup 1976 National Championship. Unfortunately for them, in those days the teams played sets of best-of-seven series to determine the national champion. Many successful Tier II clubs like the Red Deer Rustlers, the Guelph Platers, and the Vernon Vipers franchises were well rooted in their communities when they were victorious, with warchests of cash from major sponsors and massive fan support awaiting long playoff runs. The Nationals were in their infantile stage as an organization and found themselves not only national champions but financially bankrupt from months of travel across the county. They survived one more season on life support funds from the CJHL before packing it in for the 1977-78 season. The fall of the Nationals convinced the CJHL to petition the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association to consider alternate, cheaper, playdown methods to determine regional and national champions. The CAHA answered back a few seasons later with the formation of round-robin championship tournaments. Until the Pembroke Lumber Kings won the 2011 Royal Bank Cup, the Nationals were the only team in Central League history to win a national championship.
A decade later the Nationals were reborn. In 1987, the Nationals entered the Eastern Ontario Junior C Hockey League and won the league title in their first season back in action. In recent years, the Nationals have been pushing to re-enter the CJHL, but with no results so far.
Read more about this topic: Rockland Nationals
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“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)