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We named this site after an idea every hockey player already believes, whether they admit it or not: that somewhere above the rafters, the Hockey Gods are keeping score. They reward the player who blocks the shot and punish the one who celebrates too early. They decide which shots ring off the post. And they have a long memory for anyone who touches the wrong trophy. So when we came across a new book called The Hockey Gods Are Real, we ordered a copy right away.
What the Book Is About
The Hockey Gods Are Real: The Religion of Ice Hockey is by Jonathan A. Fink and was published in early 2026 by Polo Grounds Publishing. It's a short read, about 124 pages, available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook. Rather than stats or strategy, it looks at the game's spiritual side. According to the publisher, it covers miracles and martyrdom, rituals and redemption, curses, and the traditions that make hockey feel like something closer to a faith: its hymns, its specialized language, and even its fighting. Fink mixes storytelling with real-world anecdotes and some of his own experience, and he's written this kind of book before: his earlier Baseball Gods Are Real books took the same approach to baseball.
Why It Caught Our Eye
Just about every theme in that description is something we've written about here, which is a good sign we're not the only ones who see hockey this way:
Curses. The NHL's regular-season champions have a habit of falling apart in the playoffs, and we laid out the evidence in The Curse of the Presidents' Cup.
Rituals. From hats raining down after a hat trick to the plastic rats that rained on Florida's ice in 1996, hockey fans never run out of rituals. Players have plenty too, from playoff beards to the most famous mustache in hockey, Lanny McDonald's.
A language all its own. Our hockey glossary has more than 700 terms, from apples and biscuits to double doinks, and we dug into where hockey's weirdest slang actually comes from.
Fighting. Few sports have a code as old or as strange as hockey's. We tried to explain it in Why Do Hockey Players Fight.
The Hockey Gods themselves. If you're new here, start with What Are The Hockey Gods All About.
On Our Nightstand
To be clear, we haven't read it yet. Our copy is on the way, and we'll come back with an honest take once we've finished it. In the meantime, the book got us thinking, and we started a series of our own on hockey's strange side: the ghost of Bill Barilko, the Curse of Muldoon, and the Legend of the Octopus, with more to come. If you have a story of your own, like a pregame ritual you can't skip or a rink you swear is haunted, tell us on Facebook or Instagram.
If you want to read along with us, find The Hockey Gods Are Real on Amazon →