QUEBEC CITY — Tucked away at the event level inside the Videotron Centre is 20,000 square feet of empty space.

It’s mostly used for storage, and sometimes catering. But the space, according to venue staff, has been set aside with the hope of someday turning it into a state-of-the-art locker room for the return of the Quebec Nordiques.

It’s been almost 30 years since the NHL left Quebec City. The Nordiques moved to Denver in May 1995, becoming the Colorado Avalanche. Various attempts to revive the franchise over the intervening decades have been unsuccessful.

“It was a tragedy,” said Jocelyn Thibault, who played in the Nordiques’ final two seasons. “When you lose a professional team, it leaves a big hole in a city. It put a hole in a lot of people’s hearts.”

On Sunday, regular-season pro hockey returned to Quebec City for the first time in decades.

The Professional Women’s Hockey League brought its “Takeover Tour” of neutral-site games across North America to the city, with the Montreal Victoire playing the Ottawa Charge in front of a sold-out crowd of more than 18,000 fans — the second-largest announced attendance of the season.

“It was just unbelievable to see that crowd in front of us,” said Montreal forward Catherine Dubois, who grew up in Quebec City. “I had chills the whole time. It was very special.”

Une journée de rêve, tout simplement magique, pour Catherine Dubois, native de Québec 🥹

A magical homecoming for Catherine Dubois pic.twitter.com/XWhQxa8PEL

— Victoire de Montréal (@PWHL_Montreal) January 20, 2025

The PWHL, which is in only its second season, is already looking to add up to two teams as early as the 2025-26 season. With its facility, proximity to the league’s other Canadian franchises and fan support, Quebec City makes a strong case for expansion.

Is a women’s hockey team the most likely way to bring back pro hockey to the city?

It may not be an NHL city anymore, but Quebec City is still a hockey city.

On Friday night, two days before the PWHL game, fans filed into a local rink to watch the Cégep Limoilou Titans, the top-level women’s team in the city. The Titans are one of the top teams in the Quebec college hockey league — though Cégep is not college in the traditional sense, but rather a pre-university program that is unique to Quebec’s education system. With the return of starting goalie Marilou Grenier, who had a shutout for Team Canada in the gold medal game of the U18 women’s world championship earlier this month, there was reason to celebrate.

“We always have a lot of attendance around here,” said Titans assistant coach Laurence Beaulieu, who played one season in the now-defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League. “It’s not like this everywhere in the league, only (Quebec City). That’s what makes it a hockey town and incredible for professional hockey.”

One of the key arguments in favor of the PWHL expanding to Quebec City is the passionate fans who have been waiting not just for pro hockey but for any professional team to get behind. There hasn’t been a top-level professional franchise in the city since the Nordiques left, but that hasn’t stopped people from showing up for their local teams.

The Laval University football team set a record for attendance with over 20,000 fans at a game during the 2024 season. The Quebec Capitales baseball team had the second-best average attendance in the Frontier League last season. The Quebec Remparts, who play in the Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League, have the best attendance across Canadian junior hockey with more than 9,000 fans each game despite the team’s current rebuild.

“Whatever sporting events there are in our city, fans are always present,” said Tommy Castonguay, the vice president of hockey operations for the Remparts. “The community is really supportive of sports and they’re behind their teams.”

Fan support — along with ticket sales — is just one of the many areas PWHL executives will examine when considering where to potentially add its next two franchises. The top priority, according to Amy Scheer, the league’s senior vice president of business operations, is the venue.

Quebec City checks that box, too.

The Videotron Centre opened in 2015, and was built in a very public attempt to lure the NHL back to the city. It seats just over 18,000 for hockey. And despite largely being a junior hockey rink – home to the Remparts – it is a truly professional hockey facility with a large home locker room and four big additional locker rooms, which can be made into eight smaller ones when more teams come to town, as they do during the historic Quebec International Pee-Wee Tournament. There are family and team lounges, workout and training facilities and office space for staff.

🔥@quebec_remparts pic.twitter.com/0RGY0pbRWa

— Victoire de Montréal (@PWHL_Montreal) January 19, 2025

“We built it with all the facilities for NHL hockey,” said Martin Tremblay, the CEO of Quebecor Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Remparts. “It’s why the Remparts are so well treated, and it would be the same thing for a PWHL team. They would have the same access to all these facilities too.”

The Videotron Centre is a public arena, owned by Quebec City, but is managed by Quebecor. A Quebec City PWHL team would likely still be owned by Mark Walter, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers who owns the PWHL and its six existing franchises, but could be operated locally in partnership with the team at Quebecor — or at least supported by the venue staff.

Should the city get a team, Tremblay said they could build a new locker room, offices and more treatment rooms for the team with some of the space that’s been earmarked for the Nordiques. And while some concerts and other events are held at the venue, there should be more than enough dates to give a PWHL team 15 home games. There’s also the Pavilion Guy-Lafleur only a few hundred metres away as a secondary practice rink option.

“We have the space, we have our team to help,” he said. “So I think all the ingredients are there.”

The league will also look at the youth hockey landscape and how the PWHL can affect the community.

Girls hockey registration in the province has increased by almost two thousand over the last three years. In 2023-24, nearly 8,000 girls registered to play hockey in Quebec, according to Hockey Canada, which is fourth among provinces in the country, behind Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. That’s up from around 6,000 in 2021-22.

Locally, a lot of girls still play against boys, and the Cégep Titans team is the only Division 1 girls hockey team in the city, which has long led to many top players leaving the city to play in Montreal or at private schools in the U.S.

“A lot of girls just stop playing because they don’t want to move away,” said Daphné Morin, another goalie for the Titans. “I think if there was a pro team here, a lot of girls would continue to play hockey. It would give us something to look forward to in our own city.”

Quebec City is also geographically close to the PWHL’s current footprint with teams in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, New York, Boston and Minnesota. The league’s collective bargaining agreement mandates teams fly to games more than six hours or 400 miles away.

That means Montreal, Ottawa and perhaps Boston — the Tsongas Center is within the CBA limit, but their primary venue could change if attendance doesn’t improve — could all take bus trips. That’s compared to other Canadian expansion candidates such as Vancouver or Edmonton, which would necessitate air travel for all six current franchises.

There is a school of thought that a team in Quebec City could siphon support away from the league’s successful Montreal franchise. However, having a team in Quebec City could also reignite one of the most intense rivalries in the sport.

“Growing up in Montreal, we hated the Nordiques,” said Thibault. “The rivalry was so alive. I think having an NHL or PWHL team in Quebec City would just help both franchises.”

Not to mention, a team in Quebec City would likely draw more fans from the regions surrounding the city — even from neighboring Maine or New Brunswick — that are much further from Montreal. Of course, the PWHL will look further into the ticket sales from Sunday’s game and see where people came from — did they come from Montreal or Ottawa? How many were from the local area? — to see how sustainable the support for a team might be, and if it would affect its other franchises.

All that said, some of the challenges the Nordiques faced are now question marks for the PWHL.

With a population of around 560,000 — 850,000 if we include the metropolitan area — Quebec City is a smaller market compared to other candidates for PWHL expansion, such as Detroit with around 630,000 in the city and 4.3 million in the metro area.

Quebec City was the smallest market in the NHL, and the second smallest major-league city behind only Green Bay, Wisc., home of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. And when the NHL eventually expands again, it’s more likely to look to Atlanta and Houston, massive television markets, over reviving the Nordiques.

There was also a limited corporate base in the region at the time the Nordiques existed, and despite fan support at the old Colisée, the franchise was financially ailing before it ultimately decamped to Denver. The local economy is more diverse now than it was then, with major insurance companies (such as Desjardins and Beneva) based in the metro area and a growing information and communication technologies industry.

“We’re not the same city that we were 30 years ago,” said Tremblay. “At that time we were a civil servant city. Now we have insurance companies, (tech) companies. We have big head offices in Quebec City and with young professionals.

“The reasons why (the Nordiques) left don’t exist anymore in my mind.”

Still, Quebec City will need to compete with major North American markets also interested in PWHL expansion. According to Scheer, the league will examine more than 20 proposals from interested parties. Previous stops on the league’s barnstorming tour included a sellout in Vancouver (19,038), and a U.S. attendance record in Denver (14,018). Detroit, St. Louis and Pittsburgh are other strong candidates.

“We’ve been to many markets that have supported us, have been there for us, and there’s a lot of cities that want us there,” said Montreal goalie Ann-Renée Desbiens, who grew up outside Quebec City. “Obviously my heart supports Quebec City if they want a team.”

There’s also the practical challenge of the PWHL adding a team to a Francophone city. The league already has a team in the province of Quebec, but Montreal is a more diverse, bilingual city compared to the predominantly French-speaking Quebec City.

Desbiens said she didn’t think the language would be a major barrier and that any issues English-speaking Nordiques players had were “a different reality.”

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “Kids nowadays learn English way faster than what we did. People are so welcoming (here), and I know the population would go above and beyond to make everybody feel welcome … So that’s not a worry of mine.”

The league understanding the culture, language and Quebec identity would be critical to a team’s success. And the PWHL would likely need some Francophone stars to market to local fans. The best women’s hockey player in the world, Marie-Philip Poulin, grew up around 50 miles outside of Quebec City, but she already captains the Montreal Victoire. Desbiens plays for the Victoire as well.

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Would they be willing to leave for their hometown team?

It’s also fair to wonder whether fans’ desire to bring back the Nordiques would equate to support for a PWHL franchise. While many locals say the “dream” is still an NHL franchise, they’re also resigned to the fact that a return is unlikely.

The PWHL, however, feels like a much more realistic dream.

Even with a rival team (Montreal) in town, fans packed the Videotron Centre on Sunday with an announced sellout of 18,259. Poulin, Desbiens and Dubois — who scored her second goal of the season in the first period — were given loud ovations during player introductions and nearly every time they touched the puck.

“This city lost their NHL franchise and they’ve supported their QMJHL team (better) than anywhere in the nation,” said Thibault. “I don’t see why they wouldn’t support their PWHL team.”

(Illustration: Will Tulos / The Athletic. Photos: Michael Chisholm, Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)