“Tonight, fans in the Maple Leaf Gardens would groan and cheer and panic in unison.”

On May 2, 1967, the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs faced each other in a battle for hockey supremacy. It was game six, with Toronto leading the series 3-2, and only the fifth time in twenty-five years that the teams had played each other in the Stanley Cup Finals.

But this time, it was much more than a game. From the moment Foster Hewitt announced, “Hello, Canada and hockey fans in the United States,” the match between Toronto and Montreal became a turning point in sports history. That night, the Leafs would win the Stanley Cup. The next season, the National Hockey League would expand to twelve teams. The players would form an association. Hockey would become big business. The “Original Six” would become a thing of the past.

It was the last hockey game.

Placing us in the announcers’ booth, in the seats of excited fans, and in the skates of the players, Bruce McDougall scores with a spectacular account of every facet of that final fateful match. As we meet players such as Henri Richard, Tim Horton, Terry Sawchuk and Jean Béliveau, as well as coaches, owners and fans, The Last Hockey Game becomes more than a story of a game. It becomes an elegy, a lament for an age when, for all its many problems, the game was played for love as much as money.

“[A] vivid, well-researched analysis of the then-impending cultural and commercial transformation of the National Hockey League.”
– Publishers Weekly

“Anecdotes, stories and clearly enunciated insights and analysis put The Last Hockey Game right up there on the shelf with Ken Dryden’s The Game. There can be no question after reading this excellent addition to hockey’s literary canon that our game isn’t now and will never be the same as it was then.”
– Winnipeg Free Press

“The Last Hockey Game is a bold, intimate, often brilliant feat of storytelling. Bruce McDougall takes a single game, a proverbial grain of sand, and spins it into a universe. The resulting energy illuminates not just the core, the solid centre, but the ragged outer edges of the game’s greatest franchises, the Leafs and Canadiens, at the height of their greatness.”
“I saw this game, and I have to say the book is even better. The Last Hockey Game has all the inside innocence, ego, snubbed cigars, honest scars and pro-gossip from the glory days when the NHL was about to lose its virginity.”
“It’s about a game and its players, employees in a trade where even excellent work guaranteed nothing, least of all fair treatment yet they played their hearts out, for the love of the game. But the question you’ll ask yourself most often while reading The Last Hockey Game is: ‘How did he find that out?'”