Richard Harrison’s The Hero of the Play has been in print continuously for twenty-five years, with a tenth anniversary edition released in 2004. 25 is a celebration of this fact, as well as a meditation on twenty-five years of hockey poetry. This collection is a cataloguing of the way the game has woven itself into the life of the Governor General’s Award–winning poet, from childhood to fatherhood to death. It is a reflection on how the game has become such a large part of Canadian identity, shifting and changing with the times. In 25 Harrison captures the grace of the player in fluid lines, sketches the arc of the play and delivers the myth of the frozen pond to our human reality.