Ice hockey is now a global sport. Even Brazil, Mexico, Jamaica, and Australia have national teams. The National Hockey League has teams in Miami, Tampa Bay, Dallas, Nashville, and Phoenix. Junior league hockey is played in Shreveport and Amarillo. Anyone who wants to understand hockey today must not only tell a story about skates, rinks, sticks and goals, but must also tell a story about television, marketing, suburbia, social welfare, politics, class, climate change, and youth culture. Our guest in this episode, Bruce Berglund, helps us make sense of it all. He is the author of The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports (University of California Press, 2020).

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