Spectacular. Clinical. Rarely are those two words used to describe the same hockey game, but they capture well the final tilt of the Professional Women’s Hockey League’s inaugural season, as PWHL Minnesota bested PWHL Boston 3-0 at the Tsongas Center in Lowell, Mass., to clinch the Walter Cup.
Somewhere, Dorothea O’Donoghue must be smiling. The paint is still wet, but the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) picture looks promising, especially when one takes a long view. This weekend’s action came six weeks after the circuit started its 24-game schedule, six months after the league was founded, and a little more than a century after organized women’s hockey first took the ice in Boston.
What a difference a half century makes. Fifty years ago, a handful of games into the 1967 NHL season, the league’s grand expansion strategy appeared ready to collapse even before it had managed to skate its first few strides. At the box office and on the ice, things...
