Minnesota Wild Chief Operating Officer Matt Majka admitted to feeling queasy as he stood inside Aldrich Arena the night of January 22nd, 1998. At the time, Majka was in charge of the Wild's marketing department…correction, the Minnesota hockey team's marketing department.

Before that night, the "Wild" nickname hadn't existed. Majka, and a small group of Minnesota Hockey Ventures Group employees were led by branding consultant Corky Hall in a lengthy process of picking the nickname. From over 13,000 submissions (which, back then, came in the form of emails, letters and faxes) from Minnesota hockey fans, there was a lot of clamoring to resurrect the North Stars nickname. A trademark issue with the NHL made that an impossibility, so Majka and his group arrived at six finalists "that had potential": Freeze, Northern Lights, Blue Ox, White Bears, Voyageurs and Wild.The six names were pitched to the fans for feedback, and Majka admits, there wasn't a clear consensus."It was a bit of a 'pick em' situation as we got to the end," remembered Majka. "We liked the marketing potential of "Wild", so we went with it."That was the reason for Majka's sweaty palms on that January night, because he knew not everybody would be on board with the new name, which was then unveiled in wordmark form."It wasn't as popular as we might have hoped, but we also knew we had more work in front of us," explained Majka.From there, the Wild worked with New York design firm SME to come up with a logo that captured the wilderness and outdoors theme that Majka wanted to portray with the name and team identity."[SME] was fantastic," said Majka. "They really got the whole concept of what we were trying to communicate, and over the next year they worked with us to hone in on what the Wild name and logo should be all about."SME came up with 10 different concepts for the icon for the Wild. We did 300 one-on-one interviews with fans and showed them all 10. The eventual winner, now the Wild logo, was the faraway winner."On November 18, 1999 at the John Rose Oval in Roseville (where the Wild will practice outdoors this Saturday), Majka readied for another unveiling, and this time, there was zero trepidation."I wasn't nervous that day, because the fans had clearly said 'this is the mark that tells me what a Wild is.'"Since then, the Wild logo has been one of the top performing marks in the NHL. But what if they'd gone in another direction? To see what your Minnesota Wild could have looked like, we went to Minneapolis Creative agency, The Shinebox . Their team of designers took a crack at designing logos and uniforms for the nicknames that didn't get the call: