Almost immediately after Jeff Jackson became coach of the Notre Dame men’s hockey team in 2005, he decided that his players should wear gold helmets, just as the Fighting Irish football team does. The helmets, patterned after the Golden Dome atop the campus’s main building, have long been part of the university’s identity.

So the Notre Dame hockey team began wearing gold helmets, but “it was kind of a dull gold — kind of a dingy, mustard-colored gold,” Jackson said recently.

That was no good. So the helmets were taken to an automotive body shop in South Bend, Ind., to be spray-painted a shinier gold. But with all the contact in a hockey game from sticks and pucks and bumps, the gold paint would chip off. An equipment manager would touch up the helmets using a kit from an arts-and-crafts store.

By February 2013, the tinkering was done. The gold is now fused onto the plastic rather than painted on, the same method used for the football helmets. The hockey team’s gold finish is a virtual match of the Golden Dome’s 23.9-karat gold flake.