Spending the weekend in Mr. Peabody's 'Wayback Machine'

It was just intended to be a road trip, an extended weekend winter getaway with my wife and some friends.

But last week’s trek to attend the Montana Pond Hockey Classic in sunny one moment, and sideways snowy the next Kalispell, Mont., was also like time spent in Mr. Peabody’s 1960s Wayback Machine.

As readers may know hockey and I are somewhat surgically — and I guess genetically — attached at the hip. My grandfather played the game over 100 years ago in Rossland, British Columbia, and did so, he said, against a future Hockey Hall of Famer, Lester Patrick from nearby Nelson. Bill Ehlers block...