Hockey Day in Canada started out as a single town celebrating the game on a single day.

That's changed. Some time ago.

Hockey Day has turned into Hockey Week; Whitehorse has turned into the Yukon.

Celebrations began last night at MacBride Museum with the unveiling of its Yukon Hockey History display, hosted by CBC Hockey Night in Canada iDesk host Jeff Marek.

The unveiling was preceded by a Tykes game on a rink built outside the museum, a game which CBC Hockey Night in Canada host – and former Yukoner – Ron MacLean crashed.

Inside, Yukon's hockey history was splashed on the walls and encased in glass.

Stories abounded, lifetimes sandwiched between the 1905 Dawson City Nuggets-Ottawa Senators Stanley Cup series and the 2009 Golden Bra Award given at the first annual Whitehorse Women's Hockey Jamboree.

"Dude, that's first star,” Marek told the Star while pointing out the bra following speeches by MacLean, Local Organizing Committee (LOC) chairman Walter Brennan and tourism and culture minister Elaine Taylor.

On one side of the room, MacLean was steeped in conversation with Father Pierre Rigaud, who created Faro's first skating rink on the site of the present day arena, so reads the mini-bio beneath the display honouring him.

On the other side of the room Allan Cairns of Waterloo, Ont., in visiting his daughters, one in Whitehorse and one in Dawson, scanned the walls.

Marek added that, with the display, the Yukon joins the country's common language.

"The one constant conversation that always goes on is hockey,” he said. "This is Whitehorse now adding another layer to that conversation, saying, ‘We're just as important as, we have as much history as, we have a good hockey heritage, just like any city in this country.'”

Marek expected the display to be somewhat smaller.

"This is like the ultimate hockey den. As soon as I walked in here, it just felt like a hockey den, the jerseys all up on the walls. There's just so much literature and history and pictures all over the wall,” he said.

"It's a nice hidden treasure. In your really cool uncles den, when you go down into the basement and open up the door and it's great hockey memorabilia everywhere, that's kind of what this feels like for me.”

Patricia Cunning, executive director for MacBride, said all those who brought in memorabilia to be put on display had a pride in their accomplishments, joy for the game and love for their family.

"That's absolutely what they had in common,” Cunning said. "Their experiences are quite similar, in terms of minor hockey and rep hockey and the incredible obstacles that we have to overcome to get our kids into competitive hockey.”

After months of collecting, finally unveiling the history to the public – and a few special guests – was special, Cunning added.

"I'm pretty excited that Ron MacLean is here. I might be the only Yukon Museum director who Ron MacLean had come to their show,” she said. "It's hard to really explain the emotion involved in this show, because this show is really about us, it's about our families, our brothers, our fathers, our kids, and it's been an amazing experience for me to work with the hockey parents as they came in with the stories of their families and their kids.”

Cunning worked particularly close with Howie Firth, who owns the T.A. Firth building, which was filled with a lot of the memorabilia that now coats the walls at MacBride.

Over the years, Firth has tried to keep and collect any available hockey memorabilia.

"We started keeping them down at our office so that the history could be retained and people could enjoy it, and I'm very pleased with the way the museum has displayed a lot of the things that I have and I'm glad to see them being appreciated,” said Firth, adding that he competed in the first Canada Winter Games in Quebec in 1967 and won gold at the Arctic Winter Games in Whitehorse in 1972.

"Patricia came down and sort of stripped the walls of my little mini-museum and brought it down here and put it up on the walls.”

Firth has been playing organized hockey in Whitehorse since November 1954, starting with the Nelson Pipe Benders.

You remember the exact month?

"Oh, I do,” Firth said. "That was a big deal, getting into organized hockey here.”

He also remembers the first ice that froze, a pond now the current site of Wal-Mart.

"And we would go down there in November and shovel off the ice and go skating before the arena was set up and ready,” he said.

"Hockey's been going on in the Yukon since the turn of the century; my father played in 1926 in Dawson City, and I hope that it continues. This is a great start.

When I was first playing senior hockey back in the early '60s, there wasn't a place where trophies were kept, and a lot of the history was being lost at that time, and so we managed to reclaim a lot of the trophies and get them all fixed up … and carried on.”

MacLean pointed out that the first Howard Firth was mayor of Whitehorse when he lived here in the 1960s.

"His father is the only guy in Canada to have been the mayor of two capital cities: he was the mayor of Dawson City and then moved here and of course Whitehorse became the capital in 1951 after Dawson City,” MacLean told the Star. "He's kind of like Mark Messier, the only player to ever captain two Stanley Cup cities, New York and Edmonton.”

MacLean lived in Whitehorse between 1964 and 1968 when his father, Cpl. Ron Sr., was stationed in CFS Whitehorse.

The younger Ron hasn't been back to Whitehorse in more than a decade. His father will return to Whitehorse this week.

"For each community it's really important, because when Al MacInnis won the Conn Smythe Trophy in 1989 with the Calgary Flames, shortly thereafter Sidney Crosby takes the world by storm – Sid was two years old when that happened – but there's no question that when you see that he did it, you can do it,” MacLean said of the two Nova Scotians.

"The history, you don't want to lose that, because we're always changing the rules, we're chasing a dollar, we're figuring how to make the game more marketable … more ways to monetize the game, and it loses its soul a little bit in that chase, so that's why the history of the good people, the Dawson City Nuggets story, the Joe Boyle story – that is so hockey, right?”