Americans think of hockey as a quirky upper middle class sport for people in cold climates.
It's about as popular as it will ever get.
In a way that's good, because even with poor penetration in the USA American players are already becoming a bigger and bigger proportion of the NHL. If hockey became a lot more popular down south, with their 10x bigger population that would translate into US players eventually dominating rosters.
How would that affect Canadian teams? How would that affect hockey culture? The game might eventually be taken away from us over a few generations if it really caught on down south.
I'm happy with it the way it is.
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