When you’re in Huntsville, Ala., you’re standing in the middle of a big hole. The city is situated in the heart of the Tennessee Valley and on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. The limestone walls of the Plateau and Valley jut skyward and seem to lock the city within them.

That’s fitting, because Huntsville seems a world apart from nearby places like Chattanooga to the north or Birmingham to the south.

The seat of Madison County, Huntsville sits on the Alabama-Tennessee line and stretches west into neighboring Limestone County. The metro area is home to more than 400,000 people, making it the second largest in Alabama. And lots of those people aren’t what many consider stereotypical Southerners. They’re engineers and scientists who moved to North Alabama to work in high technology at the Redstone Arsenal and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

The Arsenal and the Space Flight Center may be the economic termini of the city, but the cultural heart of Huntsville is the Von Braun Center. The VBC is a complex of meeting facilities and performing-arts spaces, but its main attraction is Probst Arena, which looks like a giant, white flying saucer that landed in the middle of downtown Huntsville.

That’s appropriate, because the center is named for Dr. Wernher von Braun, the man perhaps most responsible for sending Americans into space. He’s also the man most responsible for transforming Huntsville from a small mill town to a national center for aerospace engineering. At the outbreak of World War II, the U.S. military needed somewhere to make chemical munitions, so the government picked North Alabama, somewhere unlikely, to house the Redstone Arsenal. Once the war was over, the Arsenal brought rocket scientists and engineers to Huntsville. Then came the Space Flight Center, which in turn brought more transplants, all of whom brought slices of their cultures with them. Though the original German scientists are long gone, you can still find plenty of schnitzel restaurants scattered throughout the city.

Von Braun lived in Huntsville, which thanks to him is now known as the Rocket City, for 20 years. He left for Washington in 1970, and the city decided to name its new, modern civic center for the man who almost singlehandedly made Huntsville into a city that put people on the moon.

The Civic Center Advisory Board looked nationwide for someone to run the new complex. In 1971, they found Howard Radford, who had run the Roanoke Civic Center in Virginia and the IMA Sports Center in Flint, Mich.

And like the German scientists who transplanted to Huntsville before him, he brought his own culture with him.

Radford was a hockey man. He had a hand in creating the Silver Sticks Tournament in Michigan, a large youth hockey tournament that continues to this day. He must have been in the South just long enough to gain a Southerner’s trademark hard-headedness, because he decided he wanted an ice system in his new arena, even if that didn’t make much sense to anyone involved. But he got it. The Von Braun Center finally opened in 1975, complete with an ice rink.

Four years after the Von Braun Center opened, some folks decided they’d like to see a hockey team at the local college, the University of Alabama in Huntsville. So, they started started a team. Just like you might not expect to find the world’s best aerospace engineers in North Alabama, you probably don’t expect to find Division I hockey there, either. But it’s there. After 36 years of triumph and turmoil, the UAH Chargers are still the only Division I hockey team south of the Mason-Dixon.

And they’re living proof that hockey belongs in the South — at least in the uncommon city of Hunstville.