With the NHL, that’s National Hockey League, season well underway now might be an appropriate time to give the league and its’ games a few props. Growing up in central North Carolina in the seventies and eighties with the closest ice rink 90 long miles away, I really did not know much about hockey other than knowing it was played on ice with some sort of stick. Of course for most people my generation that all changed with the now very familiar and publicized performance of Team USA at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. Still the magnitude, or should I say miracle, of that event did not pay long lasting dividends for future interest in the sport in southern states.
