Brush Christiansen went to the mayor's office when he found out about the plans for the soon-to-be-built Anchorage arena.

Christiansen, the head coach of the Alaska Anchorage men's hockey team, brought two pillars of the city's hockey community—Harry McDonald and Dempsey Anderson—to inform mayor George Sullivan that the ice surface was scheduled to be smaller than regulation.

They lobbied for something else.

They wanted to make the arena the wave of the future: a full-sized Olympic ice sheet, 200 feet long by 100 feet wide—15 feet wider than the traditional North American, NHL-sized ice sheet.

This was the size of the rink in Lake Placid, N.Y., where months earlier the U.S. had stunned the Russians in hockey's greatest upset en route to the 1980 Olympic gold medal.

The wider ice sheet would have multiple benefits: It would give players more time and space to increase creativity; it would allow the school to pitch recruits that they could train to be the next Olympians; and it could potentially help Anchorage in a bid to host a future Winter Olympics.

The mayor agreed.