Frozen in Time: A Minnesota North Stars History

It was nearly 1:30 a.m. on June 19, 1999, when Dallas Stars winger Brett Hull shoveled the puck past Buffalo Sabres goalie Dominik Hasek, ending one of the longest playoff games in the history of the National Hockey League and earning the Stars their first Stanley Cup.

Up in the Twin Cities, devotees of the erstwhile Minnesota North Stars could be forgiven for not dancing in the streets. The team’s controversial flight from Bloomington six years earlier remained a sore subject, but for those who still carried a torch for the North Stars, Hull’s goal was cause for a decidedly muted celebration.

“Secretly,” confessed one closet loyalist, “I was thrilled to see Dallas win the Stanley Cup because I still had feelings for some of the former North Star players. Some of my friends might have hanged me if they knew I was cheering for the Dallas Stars, so I watched the games alone. Although they left town, in my jealous heart the Stars were still our team.”

Jealousy. One can’t have jealousy without passion, and Minnesotans have always been passionate about hockey. On a landscape dotted with frozen ponds and lakes, it’s no wonder that they were among the first Americans to embrace the sport. In fact, Minnesota is believed to be the site of the first organized hockey game played in the United States.

Hockey was really an outgrowth of ice polo, once a popular activity and the main winter sport in St. Paul. It was a game played outside with teams of six or seven players using short, curved sticks to whack a ball into a cage slightly smaller than today’s soccer goals.

Ed Murphy, a young American athlete who had watched ice hockey in Canada and preferred it to ice polo, is credited for helping import the Canadian pastime to St. Paul in 1894.

On February 18, 1895, the University of Minnesota hockey team, comprising former football and ice polo players, squared off against a veteran squad from Winnipeg known as the Victorias. The visitors went on to beat the collegians, 11– 3. It was a rough start for Minnesota in sanctioned competition, but the game was, by most accounts, well played and well attended.

Within a few years grade- school kids throughout the area were play-ing hockey, while adults took up the game at new public rinks. As the curtain closed on the nineteenth century, organized leagues began operating in other densely populated urban areas in the Midwest and the Northeast. Cities like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York gradually adopted Canada’s game, but the craze began in Minnesota.