Indeed, a puzzling (and very cool) artifact. It does look pretty ancient, and there was the Amateur Hockey Association,
arguably the premier hockey league in Canada in the 1880s and 1890s. But there have been, and still are, loads of other leagues
with similarly generic names -- the Canadian AHA, the Michigan AHA, and on and on.
And then there's "hat trick," one of the very few phrases other North American sports have adopted from hockey, but while the expression
was first used in a similar sense in English cricket as far back as the 1870s, it wasn't in usage in hockey until the 1940s.
A most intriguing curiosity...
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