I was all set to get going on my pandemical tour through the thickets of hockey’s fiction with the old Burt L. Standish classic Dick Merriwell’s Stanchness, an American dime novel dating to 1908, that features, as maybe you noticed, the word stanchness in its title, which I’m all for, and look forward to using in everyday exchanges from now on, stanchness, meaning steadfast or (sometimes) watertight, plus the illustration on the cover showing this goal of Dick’s — a backhander, no less — is kind of glorious, isn’t it — unless Dick is the goaltender? Anyway, I was ready to go, really looking forward to reporting back from the far end of this 299-page epic, and yet, and yet, not even a chapter in, things took a turn for the anti-Semitic, so — nah.