The 'State of Hockey' story

This is from today's Star-Tribune and made this "genius" think about
his story regarding this phrase everyone in Minnesota knows so well.

Prior to coming to Mankato in 2000, I was the editor of Let’s Play Hockey for five years. In the late 1990s I had created a column in LPH called “State of Hockey." It was part of a full-page feature on Minnesota high school hockey that ran weekly.

I liked the play on words — "state" referring to both Minnesota and the condition of the sport — and I created a simple, little logo with an outline of Minnesota and those words across the map. 

Around the same time, the Wild was gearing up for its inaugural season and putting together promotional materials for season tickets, etc. Let's Play Hockey's then-owner/publisher Doug Johnson got a call from a Wild official asking if it would be all right for the team to use “State of Hockey” for some of those materials. 

Doug came to me and asked if I'd consider giving the Wild permission to use it. Although it was my creation, I told him it was his call, as he was the owner of the paper. 

Although I don’t know if any official deal was actually struck between the Wild and LPH (certainly, nothing extra came my way), the publisher gave the Wild his blessing to go-ahead to use the phrase as it wished.

The Wild did and, well, you know the rest.

Maybe it was an inevitable idea. Someone else surely would have come up with it, right? Maybe someone at the Wild had thought of it themselves, only to call LPH after doing their due diligence and jumping through the proper legal hoops. I don't know. 

But little did I realize that "State of Hockey" would become the Wild’s theme and motto and catch-phrase, that they would have a fight song/anthem composed around the concept, that it would be co-opted by seemingly every hockey entity in Minnesota and appear on T-shirts and sweatshirts and hats, or that it would still be going strong 20 years later.

Oh, well. My loss. So it goes.