Day 1
Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball, and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.
-- John Leonard
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Day 2
By the age of 18, the average American has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television, most of them occurring during Game 1 of the NHL playoff series.
-- Steve Rushin
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Day 3
Call them pros, call them mercenaries -- but in fact they are just grown-up kids who have learned on the frozen creek or flooded corner lot that hockey is the greatest thrill of all.
-- NHL Hall of Famer Lester Patrick
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Day 4
Basketball is the one sport that can truly be influenced by one man. Baseball and football can't, and hockey no one understands anyway.
-- Pat Williams
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Day 5
Hockey captures the essence of Canadian experience in the New World. In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold, hockey is the chance of life, and an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.
-- Stephen Leacock
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Day 6
Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker's responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams.
-- Roger Kahn
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Day 7
Bridge is the only game that bruises more shins than hockey.
-- Unknown
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Day 8
Half the game is mental; the other half is being mental.
-- Jim McKenny
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Day 9
Hockey belongs to the Cartoon Network, where a person can be pancaked by an ACME anvil, then expanded - accordion-style - back to full stature, without any lasting side effect.
-- Steve Rushin
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Day 10
Hockey is like a disease, you can't really shake it.
-- Goaltender Ken Wregget
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Day 11
Hockey is murder on ice.
-- Jim Murray
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Day 12
Hockey players are like mules. They have no fear of punishment and no hope of reward.
-- Emory Jones, general manager of the St. Louis Arena. (Boa BROEG, "Sports Comment," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 26 Dec., 1963)
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Day 13
Hockey's a funny game. You have to prove yourself every shift, every game. It's not up to anybody else. You have to take pride in yourself.
-- Paul Coffey
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Day 14
How would you like a job where, if you made a mistake, a big red light goes on and 18,000 people boo?
-- Jacques Plante (1929-86) National Hockey League goalie
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Day 15
I played everything. I played lacrosse, baseball, hockey, soccer, track and field. I was a big believer that you played hockey in the winter and when the season was over you hung up your skates and you played something else.
-- Wayne Gretzky
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Day 16
I was three-quarters down the list of guys I would be facing in my first game when I realized I was looking at our own roster.
-- Glenn Healy, on playing in the minors:
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Day 17
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.
-- Wayne Gretzky
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Day 18
Ice hockey is a form of disorderly conduct in which the score is kept.
-- Doug Larson
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Day 19
It's not who wins the fight that's important, it's being willing to fight. If you get challenged and renege, everyone wants to take a shot at you.
-- Barclay Plager
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Day 20
Nowhere are the dark forces that impel a man toward athletic self-destruction more clearly definable than in a hockey player.
-- William Barry Furlong,
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Day 21
One road trip we were stuck on the runway for seven hours. The plane kept driving and driving until we arrived at the rink and I realized we were on a bus.
-- Glenn Healy, on his IHL time:
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Day 22
Some guys play hockey. Gretzky plays 40mph chess.
-- Lowell Cohn, Sportswriter
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Day 23
Sources also confirm that there is no one left in Canada who can remember when hockey was a simple game, played for fun.
-- Roy MacGregor, on Yashin’s contract holdout:
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Day 24
This fastest of all games [hockey] has become almost as much of a national svmbol as the maple leaf.
-- Lester B. Pearson, Prirrte Minister of Canada, 1968
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Day 25
When I said my prayers as a kid, I'd tell the Lord I wanted to be a pro hockey player. Unfortunately, I forgot to mention National Hockey League, so I spent sixteen years in the minors.
-- Don Cherry - Boston Bruins coach
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Day 26
When we've got the puck, they can't score.
-- Paul Coffey
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Day 27
You've got to go to the net if you want to score.
-- Tom McVie
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Day 28
There are still two or three guys who aren't willing to pay the price to win a game. This is not Wal-Mart. There are no discounts in this league.
--
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Day 29
When we've got the puck, they can't score.
-- Paul Coffey
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Day 30
I went to a fight the other day and a hockey game broke out.
-- Rodney Dangerfield
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Day 31
Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain.
-- Pierre Trudeau
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