Every once in a while, I run into an old clipping that feels like it’s tapping me on the shoulder saying, “Hey… you’re going to want to tell this one.” That’s the magic of archival storytelling — the kind PG Designs has been building its whole identity around — finding these little forgotten corners of history and letting them breathe again.

This time, it was a piece from the Montreal Star, March 23, 1917, describing a women’s hockey game between Boston and New York at the old Boston Arena. The reporter confidently calls it “the first women’s hockey game ever held in the United States” — which, despite what it says, isn’t actually true — but that confidence is part of the charm. You can feel the writer discovering the women’s game in real time and being bowled over by it.

That’s the part that grabbed me.
That sense of surprise.
That sense of, “Wait… they were doing this back then?”

It feels exactly like the feeling PG Designs tries to create in every piece of nostalgia work we do — whether it’s Northern BC history, local Prince George stories, or women’s hockey heritage. We take moments that have been sitting quietly in archives and return them to the world with heart, context, and humanity.

And this 1917 game? Oh, it was a beauty.

New York apparently threw eight skaters onto the ice at one point — as if more players might fix things. Boston, meanwhile, stuck to smart passing and teamwork. You can almost picture the reporter squinting, trying to figure out how these women were running systems that looked like actual hockey.

And then there’s Ruth Denesha — the kind of character every storyteller hopes to find.
Two goals.
A hard fall.
Lost two teeth.
Got up and kept skating.

Moments like that are why PG Designs exists.
Because history is full of people like Ruth — women who skated, built, carved, created, survived, and pushed boundaries long before anyone thought to document them. Our job is to find them, to give them their pages back, and to connect their stories with the communities who will appreciate them today.

That’s what ties 1917 Boston to what we’re doing now.

We’re not just posting facts. We’re stitching together identity.
We’re showing fans, readers, and communities that the roots of the things they love run deeper than they ever imagined.
We’re helping teams like the PWHL Fleet see that their story isn’t brand new — it’s part of a long, tough, brilliant history they’ve inherited.

Reading that article, you can feel the early Boston personality already formed: gritty, clever, stubborn, a little chaotic, and completely unwilling to quit. A century later, nothing’s changed.

And that’s what PG Designs is here for — to help people see these threads, these echoes, these through-lines that tie yesterday’s game to today’s, yesterday’s communities to the ones we’re building now.

History doesn’t live in dusty archives.
It lives in the way we tell it.

And this is exactly the kind of story I love telling.