Drop 001 is an eighties drop.

Not a costume of one — we are not printing a decade on a shirt and calling it vintage. This is the era the shapes, the colours and the weights come from, and this is what was actually happening on the ice while that look was being made.

1979 — four teams walk in

The decade starts with a merger. When the WHA folded, four of its clubs joined the NHL for the 1979–80 season: the Edmonton Oilers, Quebec Nordiques, Winnipeg Jets and Hartford Whalers. They brought their own colour palettes with them — the Nordiques’ blue and fleur-de-lis, the Whalers’ green with the negative-space whale tail — and the league suddenly looked louder than it had in the seventies.

February 1980 — Lake Placid

On 22 February 1980 a United States team of college players beat the Soviet Union 4–3 in the medal round at Lake Placid, then beat Finland two days later for gold. The Soviets had won every Olympic gold since 1964. It remains the single most replayed sequence in the sport, and it is the moment hockey stopped being a regional interest in the United States.

Two dynasties, back to back

The New York Islanders won four straight Stanley Cups from 1980 to 1983 — Bossy, Trottier, Potvin, Billy Smith — and ran off nineteen consecutive playoff series wins doing it.

Then Edmonton took it. The Oilers won in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988, playing a fast, high-scoring game that looked nothing like the era before it. Wayne Gretzky scored 92 goals in 1981–82 and put up 215 points in 1985–86; neither number has been approached since. Mid-decade the league was averaging close to eight goals a game. Hockey has never been more wide open than it was right then.

What they were wearing

Sweaters cut long and loose, with big block twill numerals, shoulder yokes and heavy knit collars and cuffs.

Cooperalls — the long trousers worn by Philadelphia and Hartford in the early eighties instead of pants and socks. The league banned them after 1982–83. Three seasons, and one of the strangest silhouettes the sport has produced.

Jofa helmets, cages and half-shields arriving on a league that had only made helmets mandatory for incoming players in 1979 — which is why so much eighties footage has bare heads on the ice next to helmeted ones.

Wooden sticks, leather-palmed gloves, and warm-up gear that was mostly satin coach jackets, wool melton and corduroy caps.

That list is the source material for this drop: the proportions, the twill, the melton, the collar treatments.

Teams that do not exist any more

Half the best-looking kit of the decade belonged to clubs that have since moved or been renamed — the Nordiques, the Whalers, the Minnesota North Stars in kelly green and gold, the original Winnipeg Jets, the Vancouver Canucks in that black, red and gold skate. Los Angeles went from purple and gold to silver and black in 1988. Nothing dates a piece to the eighties faster than those palettes.

1987 — the Canada Cup

Canada and the Soviet Union played a three-game final and every single game finished 6–5. Gretzky to Lemieux with under two minutes left in the third game decided it. Most people who watched it still call it the best hockey ever played.

9 August 1988 — the trade

Edmonton traded Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings. It was front-page news in Canada and it is the hinge the sport turns on: hockey’s centre of gravity moved south, and the expansion that followed in the nineties happens because of what he did in California. The decade ends with the game permanently changed.