Luiz Valente writes: >I'd always heard that the first college hockey game in the United States >was a 6-0 Brown victory over Harvard in December of 1897. There's a >plaque in Meehan Auditorium commemorating the event. Still, hockey at >Johns Hopkins sounds almost too bizarre to be true. Are you sure it >wasn't field hockey? :-) Until fairly recently, Brown and Harvard claimed to have played the first game. Yale started touting the Johns Hopkins game, so the AHCA (not the ACHA :-)) paid to have someone do the research. They found a Yale Alumni Weekly describing the game against Johns Hopkins and, consequently, the Centennial was moved from 1997 to 1996. Prior to the Yale/Johns Hopkins game, several schools played games against Canadian or local amateur teams in the transition from "ice polo" to ice hockey (no, horses were NOT involved in the former - don't know the rules, but they were supposedly different). Brown/Harvard remains the longest running continuous rivalry in college hockey (and, IMO, one of the very best). Geoff Howell Drop the Puck Magazine HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.