from Stephen Smith of the New Yotk Times,

Now, as the N.H.L. prepares for the mid-January start of a second season that will be impacted by the virus, crises and contingencies echo from deep in the league’s 103-year history.

If all goes according to plan, the N.H.L. will play a 56-game schedule — rather than the usual 82 — that will go through May, with playoffs to follow. The Stanley Cup is slated to be awarded no later than July 9. The league said it hoped to start the 2021-22 season as usual, in October.

With the league’s 31 teams realigned to eliminate cross-border travel during the regular season, the N.H.L. will, for the first time in its history, have every Canadian team, all seven of them, alone in one division.

There is something of a precedent for that: Starting in 1926, when the Rangers made their debut, and lasting through 1938, the N.H.L. split its teams into Canadian and American divisions. But to balance the numbers, the Canadian division accommodated the New York Americans and the St. Louis Eagles.

In the 1970s, the upstart World Hockey Association featured a truly all-Canadian division for two of its seven seasons, with as many as six teams. Not everybody was enthusiastic about it: Owners of the W.H.A.’s nine teams based in the United States during those two seasons feared that the arrangement might lead to secession and an exclusively Canadian league.

While that didn’t transpire, when the W.H.A. merged with the N.H.L. in 1979, three of the four teams the N.H.L. absorbed were based in Canada: the Quebec Nordiques, the Edmonton Oilers and the Winnipeg Jets.

Like everything else in the past 10 months, a new N.H.L. season will begin amid lurking doubts.

In that, it recalls the era when the upheaval of World War II whittled rosters and raised questions of whether the league should carry on at all.

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