On March 21, 2006, the first message ever posted on Twitter arrived from founder Jack Dorsey. Since then, an estimated 425 billion tweets have followed, with an estimated 10 of them positively contributing to the well-being of humanity.

Topsy, a social analytics company that mines the web for news, has recently offered a way to comb through those tweets all the way back to Twitter’s humble beginnings, when it was a bunch of tech heads and Will Wheaton telling us what they had for lunch.

The search feature digs up messages from seven years ago, offering a snapshot at the opinions, discourse and snark at a given moment.

So we decided to unleash this technological time-waster on the National Hockey League, attempting to discover hockey’s Twitter pioneers and what they were saying about topics ranging from Sidney Crosby to the Stanley Cup during the social media service’s infancy.

C’mon … don’t you want to know which rocket surgeon made the first ‘Cindy Crosby’ joke on Twitter?

Join us, won’t you, for a look back at hockey infamy …

The methodology is simple: We used the Topsy search engine and set the dial to oldest first. We ignored any auto-tweets from media companies and aggregaters, and focused on actual human beings (we assume) using Twitter in the way-back-when.

Again, these are the first people to ever mention these topics on Twitter. The Neil Armstrongs of hockey social media!

And here ... we ... go.

NHL

Seven full-on fights? Those were the days ...

Stanley Cup

Giovanni seems confused.

Maple Leafs

Yes, it was six years ago that a 'Scarface' parody account professed its admiration for the Leafs.

Red Wings

Oh, if only there were still ties, Spencer McManus. If only ...

Wayne Gretzky

Why didn't McCain ever bring up that Gretzky age thing during the debates? Meanwhile, isn't there another Gretzky that's Twitter famous? Oh yeah:

Paulina Gretzky

Translation: "Paulina Gretzky takes scantily clad Instagram selfies." We assume.

Zdeno Chara

We figured the first mention of Chara would have either been about his shot or his height. And it was his shot.

Alex Ovechkin

Ovechkin vs. Crosby. ON NBC?! No way.

Jaromir Jagr

"Crybaby" and "Pens" in the same sentence circa 2007 did not yield the anticipated result. Speaking of which ...

Sidney Crosby

Story continues