Earlier this season, Marc-Andre Fleury and Louis Domingue had an exchange at center ice as two of only four Quebec-born NHL goalies to play a game this season. Fleury's career has lasted alongside an emerging trend in NHL goaltender geography.

There was a touching moment — literally and figuratively — during the warmup before a game last month between the Minnesota Wild and New York Rangers.

Near center ice at Madison Square Garden, veteran Wild netminder Marc-Andre Fleury skated to the red line, flipped up his mask and said a few words to Rangers goalie Louis Domingue, who was down on his pads for a groin stretch.

A high, overhead camera caught the scene as Domingue slid over and extended his arm for a glove-handed fist bump with Fleury, a future Hall of Fame candidate who is currently just four outings short of playing his 1,000th regular season NHL game — a remarkable feat that only three other goalies (Martin Brodeur, Roberto Luongo and Patrick Roy) have accomplished in the league’s 106-year history.

Now in backup and third-string roles, respectively, Fleury and Domingue were slated to play the Nov. 9 game. Domingue performed splendidly in his first NHL assignment in nearly 18 months, earning a 4-1 win with 25 saves. Fleury stopped 24 in the loss.

Jonny Lazarus, who covers the Rangers for The Hockey News, observed the pre-game chat between the two goalies and made a point of asking Domingue about it, posting his reply and a video of the brief encounter with Fleury.

“It’s actually something that everybody should listen to,” Domingue responded. “He said it’s pretty rare that two French guys get to play against each other nowadays in the NHL, so let’s give them a good show.”

Fleury, the league’s oldest goalie at 39, knows what he’s talking about. This is the Sorel, Que., native’s 20th season in the NHL. And since he debuted as a No. 1 overall draft pick with the 2003-04 Pittsburgh Penguins, the number of Quebec-born goaltenders in the league has plunged from 20 to just four.

Apart from Fleury and Domingue (born in St-Hyacinthe, Que.), the only other goalies from La Belle Province to don an NHL jersey so far this season are the Montreal Canadiens’ Sam Montembeault (Becancour, Que.) and the Buffalo Sabres’ Devon Levi (Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Que.).

Fleury’s imminent entry into the supremely exclusive 1,000-game club for goalies — the only other members of which, by the way, are also all from Quebec — offers a good opportunity to reflect on the geographical trends affecting hockey’s lynchpin position.

It’s a position that once seemed like a birthright for young Quebecois phenoms following in the tradition of legendary puck-stoppers like Bernie Parent (two Stanley Cups, two Vezinas, two Conn Smythes in two years in the 1970s), Jacques Plante (a Hart, six Stanleys, seven Vezinas and, yes, a goalie mask pioneer) and Georges Vezina (two Stanleys and namesake of the aforementioned trophy for the NHL’s best netminder).

Fleury has had a magical career with the Penguins, Vegas Golden Knights, Chicago Blackhawks and Minnesota Wild. He won three Stanley Cups with the Pens, as well as a Vezina and a William M. Jennings Trophy (lowest goals-against average). He was named an all-decade first-team all-star for the 2010s and is just the third NHL goalie to win more than 500 games (after Roy and Brodeur). That other Quebec-born superstar between the pipes, Luongo, retired in 2019 with 489 wins and stands No. 4 on the all-time victories list. And Plante is at No. 9 with 437, meaning Quebec-born goalies hold five of the top 10 spots in the NHL career-wins ranking.

During Fleury’s rookie season in 2003-04, Brodeur (Devils) and Luongo (Panthers) were still in their prime, and Roy (Avalanche, ex-Canadiens) had just retired after a sparkling career that saw him collect four Stanley Cups, three Conn Smythes, three Vezinas and five Jennings trophies.

In that 2003-04 season, Fleury’s fellow Quebec-born goalies Jose Theodore (Canadiens), Jean-Sebastien Giguere (Ducks), Patrick Lalime (Senators), Dan Cloutier (Canucks), Martin Biron (Sabres), Marc Denis (Blue Jackets) and Sebastien Caron (Penguins) were all in the No. 1 goaltending spot for their teams. Several others, including the Bruins’ Felix Potvin, got lots of starts in a backup role that year.

With 20 Quebec netminders anchoring a Canadian contingent of 54 out of 94 total goalies in the NHL in 2003-04, it was among the last seasons that saw a majority of Canadian goaltenders commanding the league’s cages — as they always had since the NHL was born in 1917.

But the relentless rise of European and American goalies in the league over the past 20 years has dramatically altered the birthplace backstory within the realm of the blue paint. 

Since the 2007-08 season, Canadian goaltenders have never again constituted a majority of all NHL goalies. And since 2019-20, total European goalies — almost evenly from Finland, Sweden and Russia — have outnumbered Canadians by a widening margin.

So far during the current 2023-24 season, 35 European goalies, 25 Canadians and 19 Americans have guarded the net for at least one NHL game. Out of 79 total goalies on NHL rosters, that translates into 44 percent European, 32 percent Canadian and 24 percent American.

The trend was just as pronounced last season. Out of 107 total goalies who played an NHL regular-season game in 2022-23, 49 of them (or 46 percent) were European, 33 (or 31 percent) were Canadian, and 25 (or 23 percent) were American.

While Europeans and Americans have similarly nibbled away over the past two decades at the dominance of Canadian forwards and defensemen in the NHL talent pool, the percentage breakdown by birthplace is considerably different for total skaters in today’s NHL: about 42 percent of all wingers, centers and defensemen are currently Canadian, about 30 percent are American, and about 28 percent are European.

That all adds up to a stronger move away from Canadian goaltenders than skaters in the NHL during the past two decades. And that trend is particularly stark in the case of Quebec, once viewed as a veritable factory of NHL goalies — and rightly so when league history and the goalie lineups for seasons as recent as 2003-04 are taken into account.

Fleury would have regularly encountered a fellow Quebec-born goalie at the other end of the rink during his inaugural NHL season and for some years afterward. But not anymore.

No wonder Fleury reminded Domingue how rare it is today for two sons of Quebec to face each other in an NHL match-up.

The trend has not gone unnoticed.

In a March 2021 column, New York Post sportswriter Larry Brooks explored the sharp decrease in the number of Quebec-born NHL goalies and described them as “an endangered species on the verge of becoming extinct.”

Biron, a Lac St-Charles, Que. native who won 230 games during a lengthy career with the Sabres, Flyers and Rangers, told Brooks the European countries’ patient, professional development program for young netminders helped explain their success in producing world-class talent.

He also cited the closing of a famed Montreal goalie school run by Frank and Benoit Allaire as a big hit for goaltender development in Quebec.

Whatever the causes, Brooks concluded that “the ongoing obsolescence of French-Canadian netminders” was “startling to those steeped in NHL tradition.”

The declining number of NHL skaters and goalies from Quebec was part of the rationale in November 2021 when Quebec Premier Francois Legault appointed a special commission to halt hockey’s declining popularity in the province and to try to boost the number of Quebec-born players in the NHL.

In fact, the man Legault appointed to head the commission was retired NHL netminder Marc Denis — a Montreal-born goalie who played parts of 11 seasons with the Avalanche, Blue Jackets and Lightning before donning a sacred Canadiens jersey for a single game prior to his retirement in 2009.

Denis later issued a suite of recommendations to widen the appeal of hockey in Quebec with women, immigrants, Indigenous peoples and lower-income residents of the province, along with various proposals to improve elite-level player development at all positions. He also recommended hockey should become the province's "national sport."

It’s worth noting that when Team Canada’s roster was announced Dec. 13 for this year’s World Junior Championship in Sweden, among the three goalies named were Boisbriand, Que.’s Mathis Rousseau of the QMJHL’s Halifax Mooseheads and St-Elzear-de-Beauce, Que.’s Samuel St-Hilaire of the Q’s Sherbrooke Phoenix, along with Alberta’s Scott Ratzlaff.

Still, Quebec’s long-term strategy to plant seeds to produce more top-caliber players from Quebec isn’t likely to bloom in time for Fleury — aka 'Flower' — to face more “French guys” in the opposition net before he hangs up his pads for good, ending a stellar career that began when his home province was still the planet’s prime breeding ground for NHL goalies.

Randy Boswell is an Ottawa writer, Carleton University journalism professor and avid hockey fan. His favorite goalie of all-time is his big brother Bernie (not Parent.)