Hockey has come a long way in America since the opening faceoff between Yale and Johns Hopkins in 1893, the first in recorded U.S. history.
The sport is now played across the country, and you needn’t look any further than the top pick of the 2016 NHL Entry Draft, Arizona-native Auston Matthews, for evidence of that growth.
Still, certain regions have always been the more traditional hotbeds—Minnesota, Michigan and Massachusetts, to name a few.
But along the northeastern coast, there is another locale that has entered the conversation, a 1,400 square mile slab of land surrounded by water on four sides, populated by nearly eight million and situated just across the East River from a major urban center.