Additionally, large tournaments and events generally avoid this part of Maple Leaf country, among other things due to its much smaller population (the largest city in the region is Halifax with a population of less than 400,000) and a considerable protrusion to the east, making it easy for fans to get there from relatively expensive Quebec or Ontario. Fortunately, the IIHF has decided to hold the Junior World Championships starting today in Halifax and Montcon, New Brunswick’s largest city, which will certainly revive the hockey atmosphere in this part of the Canada and add redness, which is important because the hockey history of this region is extremely rich.
Nova Scotia, specifically the Windsor and Herring Cove areas, small towns about an hour’s drive from Halifax, are considered the birthplace of sport in the land of the maple leaf. This is Long Pond Lake, where Canadian children started playing a Native American game of sliding over frozen water and passing wooden discs with sticks. Mentions of meetings held there – still entirely social and amateur – date back to the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. In the early 19th century, boys from King’s College, Canada’s oldest college, first played organized ice hockey on the frozen surface of the lake, and equipment for the event was provided by Native Americans , especially the Mi’kmaq tribe inhabiting the area, who had been carving sticks and discs for centuries. They were the ones who introduced their winter entertainment to newcomers from Europe. It is therefore not surprising that the region around Long Pond is called the cradle of this discipline and that it is here that the Hockey Museum was established, the permanent exhibition of which includes, among other things, photos of archives and newspaper clippings documenting early hockey games and tournaments, or the equipment used by First Nations and later European players.
Another point on Nova Scotia’s historic hockey map is the Halifax Forum, which was built on the ruins of the Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition Hall after that building disappeared with half the city after a massive explosion in the port in 1917. Opened exactly a decade later, the Forum was the first artificial ice rink in this sector and only the second in Canada, after Montreal. This is where the legendary Guy Lafleur scored his first professional goal. The Forum hosted professional team Nova Scotia Voyageurs, the first Canadian club to win the Cudler Cup. Currently, the Forum is home to the Halifax Mooseheads (QMJHL) and Dalhousie Tigers clubs and the Saint Mary’s Huskies of the collegiate league.
Another historical rink is Stannus Street Rink, where two professional teams played their home games: the Windsor Swastikas (the club existed in the years 1905-1916, so it had nothing to do with what was happening in Europe in the 1930s) and the Windsor Maple Leafs (1959-1964).
The Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame is another venue that harkens back to the province’s rich hockey history. The exhibit, titled “Hockey – Whose Game Is it”, emphasizes the sport’s Indigenous roots and Nova Scotian influence on the development and evolution of hockey equipment, presenting hockey as a historical, sociological, cultural and industrial phenomenon.
It seems that with the junior championships, high-level hockey has finally returned to its Atlantic cradle.
