An editorial from 1903, written after the crew of the English vessel Discovery established winter quarters in huts along the frozen shore, stressed the importance of hockey to help cure loneliness: "A new and healthy pastime this autumn has been the games of hockey on the ice. Notwithstanding the low temperatures, the occasional biting wind, and the unstinted generosity with which bruised shins and black eyes have been bestowed, the enthusiasm is unabated and the game still remains popular." A column cataloguing "principal monthly events" pinpoints the inaugural Antarctic hockey game occurring on March 25th, 1903. The men's window for daytime exercise was brief; the sun disappeared from April to August, though occasional matches commenced under a full moon. "As we can expect no light from without," wrote Ernest Shackleton, the third officer on the Discovery and the first editor of the SPT, "we look for the light within."

The humbling realization that explorers with only sledge dogs as companions managed to rally together and organize some games on the ice makes the return of professional hockey feel all the more appropriate. It certainly lends perspective to what truly constitutes a waiting game.

Comparing polar opposites—Antarctic survival, North American recreation—is not entirely fair, of course, though I couldn't help but detect a certain charm in reports of NHL players and personnel occupying unwanted free time as if they were castaways. A center for the Washington Capitals tinkered around his house so much he contemplated knocking down entire walls. National broadcaster Mike Emrick called play-by-play for a girls' 12-and-under game. After Christmas, a bored Canadiens defenseman took to Twitter to suggest a pickup game at a public rink in Montreal, the hockey-crazed city where the NHL was founded in 1917, and people of all ages arrived in droves to skate alongside a pro. Like all bright spots during hockey's shipwrecked season, however, there was a bitter chaser. The following week the New York Times reported that cooling systems are now required to keep ice inside Arctic arenas frozen, posing concerns that the Canadian tradition of pond hockey might fade by midcentury.

Cooling systems were hardly necessary at Antarctic pick-up games. In Sara Wheeler's biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the English zoologist and third editor of the South Polar Times, she recounts a hockey game in 1911 that "was abandoned when the puck, which they had made from shellac and paraffin wax, shattered as soon as it was struck." Other pieces of equipment were built to last. Among the items preserved by sub-freezing conditions inside a prefabricated hut erected during Robert Falcon Scott's deadly Terra Nova expedition over a century ago, one can still find tins of digestive biscuits, a chemistry set frozen in mid-use, a box of penguin eggs, and hockey sticks. (On a related note, a stick belonging to the Australian cartographer Alexander Lorimer Kennedy, used during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14, sold at a Christie's auction in 2007 for more than $3,000.)