A few weeks ago, I got the chance to sit down and watch the entirety of CBC's Hockey: A People's History, a documentary miniseries that thoroughly covers the history of hockey from its 18th century origins to its 21st century modernity. The series debuted in 2006 and consisted of 10 hourlong episodes. It is a biography of Canada's national sport, but also illustrates the lives of the greatest players involved with the game, among the many other people who helped shape hockey into what it is today.

Ten hours certainly gives the series enough chance to cover hockey's incredible history. I'm a pretty big hockey fan and I have a history degree from Western, so being interested in the origins of the sport is something that's right up my alley. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case with a lot of other hockey fans. For some reason, hockey fans don't quite have the reverence for its ancient history in the same way that baseball fans have for their favourite sport.

Baseball is history. Its history is cherished, which explains why the recent tarnishing of many of baseball's most sacred records has been met with such disdain by baseball fans. But hockey's history feels shorter compared to baseball, even though it isn't. Hockey history seems to start with the NHL's late 1960s expansion. People may make vague allusions to the "original six" era, but how many fans can name the great players of the Toronto Maple Leafs dynasty of the 1940s? Who was the league's best player before Gordie Howe? Mr. Hockey only began playing in the NHL in the late 1940s; professional hockey, the NHL or otherwise, had already been around for decades. Many of the great players of the pre-war times seem lost forever in history.

That was one thing I enjoyed about A People's History. The documentary focuses largely on Canada's history of hockey, but I learned a tremendous amount about pre-war players, leagues and stories that I may have only been vaguely familiar with before. It also made me want to go out and get some books about the pre-war era of hockey.

You can purchase a DVD box set of the mini-series from the CBC website. Each episode covers a different part of hockey's history, moving in chronological order from an exploration of the development of the game in the first episode to the modern post-lockout NHL in the final episode. If you're a hockey fan and you haven't seen it, I give it my highest recommendation (for baseball fans out there, an even more massive documentary miniseries covers the history of baseball, titled Ken Burns's Baseball, which is also highly recommended). For those of you more inclined to reading, a coffee table book written by hockey writer Michael McKinley has been printed documenting the same history described in the miniseries.

You can read more about Hockey: A People's History at cbc.ca/hockeyhistory.