“The thing I found about hockey in Boston is that everyone has played with and against each other in high school, in college, and it goes back generations,” said Jim Madigan, a scout for the Pittsburgh Penguins who came to Northeastern from Toronto in 1981 as a player and went on to coach the Huskies from 1986 to 1993. “They all know each other, and they all have their stories about the Boston Arena or Matthews.”

One such story was offered by Ben Smith, who played in the building with Gloucester High School and Harvard and later coached Northeastern.

Image Known mostly as a place for hockey, Matthews Arena was opened for other events. Credit... Northeastern University

“Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the ice surface at the arena was short, and it was shaped kind of like a football,” Smith said. “So we’d come in and play B.U., back when they were using the arena as their home ice, and I’d go back to touch the puck for icing, and here comes little Jack Parker from B.U. chasing after me. And I’d get my stick stuck in the boards in those narrow corners, and it’d stab me in the stomach and knock the wind out of me. Everyone thought Jack, who weighed 150 pounds, had knocked me out. I weighed about 200.”

Parker is the longtime coach at B.U.; Smith lives down the street from him.

Through the first decade of the 20th century, hockey in New England was played outside, on frozen ponds and rivers. The opening of the arena galvanized Boston hockey.

The game had moved indoors in Canada and in scattered areas of the United States like New York and Pittsburgh several years earlier. Moving it indoors in Boston was like bringing a wild plant into a greenhouse and watching it grow.

“It was like a gift from heaven,” Fred Hoey, a Boston Herald sportswriter, wrote a few years later. “The hope and ambition of every Greater Boston hockey player was realized  players and coaches could now count on a schedule of ice.”