I'm old.

I'm not grandfather old, but old in terms of watching, playing and analyzing hockey.

One of my first hockey memories was being given a book for either my 5th birthday or that Christmas titled "1974-75 Pro and Amateur Hockey Guide" published by the Sporting News. It was incredible. It had every player who played in the NHL, WHA, AHL and NAHL (the WHA farm team league).

The history of the AHL and NAHL is fascinating and probably worthy of a book in its own right.

Getting that book was the first time I could individualize these players. I was able to see where they were born, when they were born, where they played junior hockey and what their road to professional hockey was. In my mind, I didn't need to watch these players play; it was all right there on the page.

I could imagine who they were, how they played and where they were going.

Of course, there were hockey cards back then, but this was like having your own hockey bible right in your hands. It was the equivalent of having a smartphone.

I wasn't even aware that the NHL published its own guide and record book each year until 1980-81, and that brought a similar thrill, which made me go out and buy that every year until about 2013-14 for obvious online reasons.

My first hockey game was in 1974-75 at the Pacific Coliseum with the Vancouver Canucks playing. I can't remember the score or the opponent, but I remember getting a program and being delighted at the updated stats in the middle of it. It was almost like it was in real-time.

My love of the Canucks was born, and one would think that, as a five- or six-year-old, it was safe to assume that we would have a Stanley Cup by the time I was fifty years older—the naivete of small children.

Early hockey pool aficionados will regale you with stories about how we weren't allowed to pick Wayne Gretzky in the early to mid-1980s and were instead required to choose his goals OR his assists as your pick. It sounds ridiculous, but there were years when his assists went first overall, and his goals were a second-round pick.

I had a book in 1982 which was called the Great Gretzky Yearbook by Terry Jones. It was written after his 92 goals and 120 assists in 1981-82. I remember at the back of the book, it had a section where you could write in his production from the 1982-83 season on a game-by-game basis and track his stats. He ended up with only 71 goals and 125 assists in that year.

I didn't mean this to be about me in particular, but more about the growth of statistics and the access to them over the years.

I don't think younger people appreciate how accessible information is these days (good or bad). They don't need to be thankful, but just acknowledge what an incredible time for statistics in sports this is.

Bill James (the father of advanced stats in baseball) started with pencil and paper and published stats. 

I remember being in New Zealand, where I played rugby for close to a year during the 1992-93 season, when the Los Angeles Kings lost to the Montreal Canadiens in the Stanley Cup.

We had access to nothing from the NHL. There were no games on TV, there was no internet, and there was no email. I had a friend send me photocopies by fax of the Tuesday stats that used to come in the local newspaper. We had to send them to the local post office in our small town in New Zealand and pay to have them printed out.

As soon as I had them, I would pore over them for hours on end, re-creating what had transpired and what might happen from then on. When I got another fax a few weeks later, I would handwrite on one copy what players had done during that period. It was exhilarating.

Access to hockey statistics now is incredible, but it can be overwhelming for quite a few people. There are so many charts, graphs and advanced stats that they sometimes lose their appeal to the masses. For myself, these are the golden years of stats.

It is quite easy to set up an API for a website that gives you updated statistics for most sports. That kind of data was magical in a sense, thirty or forty years ago.

Anyone can be a statistician. You don't need permission or acknowledgement to calculate something that you think might have value. If you enjoy it and you think there is something there, do it.

Still to this day, I can print out or drop the player stats into an Excel spreadsheet and just lose myself for hours.

The number of hours in which I can lose myself to hockey stats is quite irresponsible.

What I find lacking these days is my interest in actually watching the games, and being emotionally invested in my team is not what it used to be. The highs aren't as high, and the lows aren't as low.

I find myself coasting in my hockey pools and in writing a few of my articles, to be honest. I don't think it's fair to the reader, myself or Dobber if my mind isn't 100% in it.

On that note, this is my last article for the Wild West and Dobber Hockey. Ironically, my first article ran on January 18th, 2019, which is almost seven years to the day.

It wasn't particularly good or insightful, but it was my first foray into writing about hockey.

I'm so thankful to Ian Gooding and Dobber for allowing me to play in this sandbox for seven years and letting me have the freedom to write about what interested me (and hopefully others).

I'd also like to thank my editors along the way, Puneet Sharma, Michael Clifford, Brennan DeSouza, Alex MacLean, Mario Prata and Cam Robinson.

Thank you to the readers. I always wrote about what I thought was interesting, but if anyone else enjoyed it, then it was all gravy.

I hope that this opens up an opportunity for someone else to write about what interests them in this great sport.

I intend to focus on my player game ratings and stay involved in hockey stats in some way or another.

Follow me on Twitter @gampbler15