Traditionally, it is THE winter sport for the northern bit of the Eastern Seaboard and the Great Lakes area. Testing my memory here, but I believe the original 6 teams were Boston, New York, Detroit, Montreal, Chicago, and Toronto. (Or was it another place instead of Toronto - maybe Philly or Minnesota?). I only remember those days vaguely.

I definitely remember my dad & uncles being aghast when hockey franchises started popping up in places like Florida and California. It was like someone was blasphemizing their religion.

In Wisconsin and Minnesota, especially the northern hinterlands - it is a formal religion.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley