Imagine hockey stats that span a century, allowing you to compare an NHL player’s offensive output in 2015 with that of an NHL player from 1925.

Imagine having the ability to search NHL stats to find something as specific as the number of times a 6-foot Latvian center has scored a game-tying goal on a Tuesday.

Imagine the perfect marriage of state-of-the-art player tracking technology – putting a chip in the puck and on the players to collect data – and real-time stats from a game that redefine concepts like “puck possession.”

And imagine, using that player-tracking tech, being immersed in a 3-D digital recreation of an NHL game, allowing you to swoop through the rink like it’s a video game. It’s one thing to follow the puck; it’s another to follow the entire game from the puck’s POV.

Hockey fans: Prepare to tumble down the Internet rabbit hole.

The NHL and SAP, the multinational software corporation that owns the naming rights the San Jose Sharks’ arena, have partnered on revamping NHL.com’s stats pages in the short term, and integrate player tracking data into the site in the long-term.

The revolution begins on Feb. 20, as the switch is flipped on the new NHL.com stats pages. Here’s what to expect from the League over the next two years, as it revolutionizes the way we watch and analyze the game.

PHASE ONE (Feb. 2015)

The NHL and SAP were in negotiations for around nine months to bring to hockey the sort of innovation the company had already handed to the NBA and other leagues.

Their “secret sauce,” as the NHL calls it: a database called HANA that computes stats faster than any other before it. It’s the engine that runs NBA.com’s stats pages, allowing fans to dip back into basketball numbers from as far back as 1946.

In September 2014, SAP data scientists in Palo Alto began redesigning the front end of NHL.com, giving the stats pages a facelift and adding new categories while keeping the site’s user-friendly functionality. Photos will run larger. Features are integrated with the stats leaderboards. It all looks a bit prettier.

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There have been enhancements to the basic stats that we’re all familiar with – hello, secondary assists, finally – but the most immediate and startling change to the site is the integration of advanced stats, a.k.a. “fancy stats,” which the NHL is calling “enhanced stats.”

For years, fan-run sites had tracked puck possession through stats called Corsi and Fenwick, scraping data from official NHL game sheets to glean information like shot attempts and ice time. Last year, the NHL quietly prohibited data scraping in its official Terms of Service agreement with users, an obvious signal that it planned to start offering these metrics on its own.

The NHL will begin with 30 “enhanced” stats, including five variations of Corsi and Fenwick that account for score situations, relativity and percentages.

(Oh, and they’ll no longer be called “Corsi” and “Fenwick,” either. Say hello to “shot attempts” and “unblocked shot attempts,” as Corsi slips into the same abyss as the Patrick Division and the Campbell Conference. So that’s SAT and USAT; and, going forward, “SAT Even, SAT Ahead, SAT Behind.”)

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