@epersonae, @redsesame, @emi--rose and I were having our weekly Star Trek watch party with friends tonight and the topic of hockey came up (blame Emi) and we were joking about what hockey would look like in Star Trek. I made the argument that the Andorians would have been INCREDIBLE hockey players, so much so that they probably won the Stanley cup so many times that's why they didn't play hockey any more by TNG and then oops, this popped out.
Terran hockey was a popular game, going back many centuries on earth. It remained popular among humans even as they began exploring and colonizing space. The Lunar Cheeseheads were the first non-terrestrial team to win the Stanely cup in 2101 and went on to do so for a record 4 years straight; the Martian Bradburys won for the first time in 2109.
After the formation of the United Federation of Planets in 2161, hockey and other Terran sports gained popularity among the other charter members. Sharing of sports and other cultures was seen as an act of camaraderie and building of good faith, much like the ancient Olympics on Earth.
Of all the other members of the Federation, the Andorians took to hockey the quickest. This is unsurprising, given their native icy climates and own cultural history of contact sports. The sport spread across Andoria, with an astonishing 18 teams active in the FHL in 2179. The Andorian Gas Giants first won the championship Stanley Cup in 2176, and then again in 2178 and 2179.
By the time the Aenar Ice Combs won the Cup in 2186, it hadn't been back to Earth in nearly two decades.
Hockey slowly began losing popularity in the late 2200s, and by 2348, the FHL was no more. Some scholars say it finally fell out of favor for less violent sports; others say the opposite as relations with the Klingons began to thaw and Parrises Squares gained in popularity. Others still say that humans lost interest in the sport of their ancestors because they couldn't stand to continue losing to their blue rivals.
Whatever the cause of its demise, hockey left its mark on the hearts and dental records of centuries of sports fans across the galaxy.