Hockey Card Album

Back in the spring of 1991, Panda had to travel to Toronto to do her EEG practicum at Sick Kids (aka the Hospital for Sick Children). While she was in Toronto, Panda lived in a dorm-like residence with her own room but a shared bathroom. Panda did not know anybody in Toronto, so, when she wasn’t working, wandering around Yonge Street, or going to the mall to buy a now-long-lost silver bunny bracelet, she would go to the sports cards shop to buy Upper Deck hockey cards. Panda would always buy a pack or two at a time, and, even though there was no bubble gum with these cards, she would still be excited to open and then carefully place them in a blue hockey card album (pictured above). At the time, Panda made the decision to organize the cards alphabetically by team name (rather than by city name– a decision she is still happy with today) starting with the Blackhawks (Jeremy Roenick) and ending with the Whalers (Dean Evason).

Above: end of the Bruins pages and start of the Canadiens

Whenever she got a card, rather than playing those games that kids play with them, Panda would carefully figure out where they went in the binder and put them there.

Below: Rod Brind’Amour!

Eventually Panda finished her EEG practicum and left Toronto, and the album went into into Panda’s mom’s bookcase in her dusty British Columbia basement. There the cards sat for decades until finally Panda met OvenMitt. Shortly after meeting OvenMitt, Panda found out that they had a shared interest in ice hockey and knew that OvenMitt would want to see the hockey cards, so she went to her mother’s house and found them. And now last weekend, after a long week of waiting for OvenMitt to drive up in his truck to Vancouver from Seattle, the two of them finally got to look at the hockey cards together.

What could be more fun than that on a rainy Saturday night? And what other hockey-related memorabilia could Panda possibly have to show OvenMitt?

Sidenote– While looking through the hockey card album, Panda and OvenMitt also took a trip down memory lane watching postgame coverage of this year’s NHL Heritage Classic. Look– it’s Gretzky and Hawerchuk on the television screen!