Backcheck: A Hockey Retrospective Hockey is much more than a bunch of guys with missing teeth and mullets. Thanks to the National Library of Canada, even non-Canadians can appreciate the origins of this rough-and-tumble ice sport. Skate back to the early days and learn how Canadian hockey started in the mid-1800s. Women's hockey also gets its due -- after all, Lord Stanley's own daughter loved to play. The heart of this site is the Great Hockey Stories, which features newspaper articles from 1829 to the present. Read about the origins of the Stanley Cup, a 1907 game that resulted in murder charges, the 1924 expansion of NHL teams into the U.S., the girl who secretly played on a boy's team in 1955, and the stunning 1988 deal that sent Wayne Gretzky from Edmonton to L.A. You don't need to understand icing or power plays to get a kick out of Canadian hockey's long history. (in Sports)
