The
structure of a hockey game confuses the hell out of people who have grown up with standard
American timed sports -- instead of having 4
quarters, and
halftime between the second and third quarters, a hockey game is subdivided into three 20-minute
periods, with two 20-minute
intermissions inbetween. This seems like a simple
concept, and indeed it is, but you would not believe the
difficulty some people have with this. Hockey was introduced to
Richmond,
Virginia in
1990 by the
Richmond Renegades of the
East Coast Hockey League, and I became a fan
on the spot. Despite my explanations, though, I think it took my mom, born and raised in the
Tidewater, about six years before she understood the idea of three periods making up a game, and there being no halftime.
The International Hockey League experimented with a four-quarter game once in 1998, in two games involving the Las Vegas Thunder, in a marketing gambit to see if the game could be standardized into a similar structure as most other timed sports A five-minute break was used between quarters 1 and 2 and quarters 3 and 4, and a 20-30 minute halftime was used. Hockey purists the world over screamed in agony, but more important was the fact that the players and coaches didn't like it, complaining that the five-minute break was worthless, 15 continuous minutes was too short to get a rhythm going, and 30 semi-continuous minutes was too long before they could go back to the locker room for a real break.