When the two young guys who founded Babsocks started saying six months ago they had big plans in the works, I could only laugh.

In the past, they had talked about creating things like Shana-hands (gloves with Brendan Shanahan’s face on them) or Sundies (underwear with Mats Sundin), among other zany, hockey-themed apparel.

But when I heard their new idea, I was blown away. So, too, was the NHL Alumni Association when they learned about it.

And now, six months later, it’s happening.

This week, Jake Mednick and Tom McCole are launching the Sockey Hall of Fame. It’s an ambitious project that is creating socks for many of the most famous players in NHL history, with the end goal of getting 150-plus faces on footwear.

Fifteen NHL teams have already agreed to sell the socks and display Sockey Hall of Fame signage in arena stores, including the Leafs, Rangers, Bruins, Flyers, Kings and Flames.

The idea also includes an online subscription service, where fans will be able to sign up to get delivered a random NHL alumni sock every month or two. Mednick and McCole hope they become like hockey cards, where fans trade and collect them to form sets.

The concept is a full partnership with the NHL Alumni Association, led by executive director and president Glenn Healy, who is spearheading a wide-scale effort to increase alumni revenues. Most of the proceeds are expected to be directed back toward helping NHL alumni in need.

“Our vision and our goal is to take care of alumni — players that need help,” Healy said. “The Joe Murphys. That’s where the money goes — to help get him a place to live in the winter. That’s what you’re looking at. Or it goes to players who are 65 and (whose) pensions absolutely suck. A guy who played in the ’60s, his pension’s about $6,000 a year. Are you going to live on that?”

The list of NHL alumni with socks ready to go currently includes Mats Sundin, Cam Neely, Pavel Datsyuk, Bobby Clarke, Bernie Parent, Ron Hextall, Peter Forsberg, Joe Sakic, Ray Bourque, Jeremy Roenick, Stan Mikita, Johnny Bucyk, Terry O’Reilly, Doug Gilmour, Johnny Bower, Wendel Clark, Ted Lindsay, Brett Hull, Teemu Selanne and Mike Modano.

Here are a few examples:

From left, clockwise: Mario Lemieux, Mats Sundin, Teemu Selanne, Joe Sakic

From left, clockwise: Brett Hull, Lanny McDonald, Bobby Clarke, Peter Forsberg

Recently retired fourth-liner turned social media star Paul (Biz Nasty) Bissonnette also has his own sock as a way to help promote the concept.

“He asked if we were drunk, when he found out we wanted to use his,” Mednick said.

“Fun idea,” Bissonnette said when shown his sock for the first time. “It’s a fun gift… and it’s for a great cause.”

Mednick said they have already received heady praise from the likes of Mats Sundin, who he first showed the sock to at a Hockey Hall of Fame event. Sundin quickly asked an alumni association official to arrange for 50 pairs to be delivered to his home in Sweden.

The stylized socks are the work of artists Don Zacharopoulos and Felix Ding. Most of the likenesses are immediately recognizable. Some — like Bobby Clarke’s gap-toothed smile and Lanny McDonald’s moustache — are downright iconic.

In all, approximately 50,000 socks are being produced for the first trial run. Something tells me they’ll be needing more orders quickly given that they’ve sold roughly 400,000 pairs of Babsocks in the past three years.

The Sockey Hall of Fame should have more widespread appeal than those. It helps that pairs will be available at many NHL games.

“The Maple Leafs really went all in,” Mednick said of an example of the support some teams have given the initiative. “They ordered a ton for the fall.”

For his part, Healy likes the idea that it isn’t a partnership that focuses only on the biggest names. Lemieux, Gilmour, Sakic and others will have socks, but so will other fan favourites like Bob Probert.

Mednick and McCole want to eventually have socks for pioneers like Willie O’Ree and female stars like Hayley Wickenheiser down the road.

“It doesn’t have to be Darryl Sittler,” Healy said. “It doesn’t have to be Wendel Clark. It can be a guy like Biz Nasty. I think that’s what makes everybody feel like they’re part of this. It’s one team now — it’s not 31 teams. It’s your alumni team, and everybody is a part of it.”

Mednick and McCole’s new apparel company will be called My Fanchise, and the socks will be available for presale online at their website beginning today. The pair hopes that this initiative can be an even bigger success than Babsocks and translate into a long-term windfall for all NHL alumni and associated charities.

“They’re trying to take care of the old boys,” McCole said of the fact Lemieux and other retired superstars signed over their likeness to the project. “Making sure there’s money and resources available for these guys is pretty important. It’s an honourable thing for these (star) players to sign over their rights to the alumni.”

“It all comes down to our mission statement here,” Healy said. “Honour the past. You do that in many different ways. One is financially helping players that have fallen through the cracks. There’s transition (assistance) for players. And there’s the health of players who didn’t play in the 2018 era that you’ve got to help. That mission statement doesn’t change. It’s to help players and families. This is just a unique, pretty cool idea that these two guys came up with…

“What I heard from all the players was ‘Just let me know how I can help. That’s all I want to do.’ It wasn’t hard to make this thing happen.”

(Top photo: www.myfanchise.com)