Ottawa! Ottawa! Ottawa!

Lore & Background

The chant's power lies in its simplicity. No melody, no complex harmony — just the city's name hammered out in a staccato rhythm that any child can pick up in the first row and any grandparent can sustain in the upper deck. In a league where rivalries are often defined by decades of grudges, the Senators' identity is built on something more elemental: the act of a community saying its own name back to itself, over and over, until the walls vibrate. That identity is inseparable from the original Senators, the team that carried Ottawa's name across more than sixty years of professional hockey before the franchise disappeared in 1934. For a generation of fans, the modern club's arrival in 1992 was not a new beginning but a homecoming. The chant, in that context, is less a song and more a reclamation — a way of insisting that the name still belongs to the city, that the red-and-black jersey still means something even after the long gap. The rivalry with Montreal deepens the chant's resonance. In a city that has long felt overshadowed by its larger neighbour, the act of chanting "Ottawa" in unison carries a quiet defiance. The chant makes it so, for three beats at a time.

Reader's Guide

Canadian Tire Centre, the Senators' home since 1996, is a modern NHL arena located in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata. The building has cycled through several naming-rights sponsors over the years, but to fans it is simply "the building" or "the Sens building." The seating bowl wraps tightly around the ice, keeping the crowd close to the action and amplifying the sound of the chant in a way that larger, more open arenas cannot replicate.

The ritual is simple and democratic. At key moments — a goal, a save, a penalty kill, the pre-game anthem — the crowd locks into the three-beat "Ottawa! Ottawa! Ottawa!" rhythm. It is not choreographed; it emerges organically, often led by a section of the lower bowl. Fans in the upper deck pick it up a half-beat later, creating a rolling wave of sound. Red and black scarves, foam fingers, and homemade signs fill the stands, and the colour palette is so uniform from above that the crowd appears as a single red-and-black organism.

The team weaves itself into Ottawa's civic identity in ways that go beyond sport. The Senators' red-and-black is woven into local shop signage, school spirit days, and the city's winter aesthetic. The rivalry with Montreal is treated less as a sporting contest and more as a cultural conversation, referenced in local media, humour, and everyday speech. The chant, in all of this, is the thread that ties the arena to the street: a three-word sentence that any Ottawan can say, anywhere, at any time, and mean it.