Go to the Net: Eight Goals That Changed the Game

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Most hockey books tend to be biographies of players, histories of teams
or leagues, collections of hockey miscellanea, or annuals. Strachan, a
hockey reporter for some three decades and presently a columnist with
the Toronto Sun and analyst with CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, has
authored a different type of hockey book. It examines how the game of
hockey has changed over the last two and a half decades. As the subtitle
indicates, Strachan has selected eight goals that were scored between
1979 and 2002, goals that he argues defined a moment when the game
changed.

When Strachan speaks of hockey, he means the National Hockey League and
hockey as played by the league’s Canadian players. The reason that
none of the goals predates 1979 is that one of Strachan’s criteria for
including a goal was his having personally witnessed the goal as a
sports reporter. Of the eight goals, five occurred during international
competitions such as the Canada Cup or the Winter Olympics, while the
other three were scored during the Stanley Cup playoffs. The book’s
opening goal, the 1979 Challenge Cup winner put into the Canadian net by
Russia’s Boris Mikhailov, is the sole goal scored by a
non-NHLer—this Russian victory signalled that Canada could no longer
claim to be the world’s premier hockey power. The other goals
connected to the international events each mark a step toward Canada’s
return to top spot in the hockey hierarchy, with the book’s final goal
being the one that gave Canada gold in the 2002 Olympics. The impact of
the international goals is more obvious than that of the three Stanley
Cup playoff goals. Only Brett Hull’s disputed cup-winning goal during
the 1999 finals had an almost immediate consequence by reducing the role
of video replays.

Strachan provides a rich context for each goal, and his knowledge of
the game, plus his personal relationships with the players, coaches, and
general managers, make the anecdote-filled chapters highly readable. The
book’s additional features include an index and an eight page section
of photos, most in full colour.