National Hockey League shooters poured 21 shots behind six goaltenders Sunday in Kanata, Team Chara beating Team Alfredsson 12-9 to win the NHL's 59th All-Star Game.

The exhibition would be history by the time Charlie Hodge planned to leave his home in Aldergrove, B.C., heading west to watch a Junior A game between the Surrey Eagles and visiting Victoria Grizzlies.

And Hodge fully expected that his 44-year-old record would be turning 45.

"The all-star boys won't be getting a shutout. They'll be in quite the shooting gallery," Hodge had predicted over the phone two days earlier, chuckling about the ventilation that awaited the halfdozen netminders.

Hodge and a heartbeat-long Canadiens goaltending teammate, the late Garry Bauman, share the only shutout in NHL All-Star Game history, a record that should stand forever.

Their 3-0 Canadiens whitewash of a superb all-star squad came in the dawn of 1967 at the Montreal Forum, the 1966 Stanley Cup champions, coached by Toe Blake, pitted against a squad of Original Six stars directed by Detroit's Sid Abel.

"Don't ask me for a lot of details," said Hodge, 78, the Lachine native who stopped 25 shots in the first and third periods, Bauman blocking 10 in the second.

"And the only reason I recall anything about the shutout is because it was mentioned in Garry's (2006) obituary."

In the lead paragraph of a newspaper tribute, no less.

The first official NHL All-Star Game was held Oct. 13, 1947, organized to benefit the fledgling players pension plan. In its early days, the contest was a season opening, often ornery autumn game between the league champion and a galaxy of stars culled from the NHL's five other clubs.

Today, it's a corporate schmooze (this season branded by a doughnut chain), its 60 minutes of fan-voted, popularity-contest Hockey Lite simple window-dressing for events showcasing the NHL and its sponsors.

The game is what it is, to borrow from the modern player's vocabulary, a winter break that mostly thrills those who yearn for doubledigit scoring.

These offence-hungry fans would have loathed the NHL's 20th All-Star Game, the first played midseason and the final before expansion, held Jan. 18, 1967, at the Forum.

The Wednesday night match was telecast by CTV "live and in colour," The Gazette reported, and in the U.S. by a network of roughly 70 independent stations assembled by Madison Square Garden and RKO General Sports Production.

Canadiens coach Blake dressed Bauman in place of the Habs' Gump Worsley, who was out following knee surgery. Also sidelined by injury were Canadiens captain Jean Béliveau, Jimmy Roberts and Léon Rochefort.

It was only the second game in a Habs uniform for Bauman, the Innisfail, Alta., native who would play only once more for Montreal before backstopping 33 matches for Minnesota from 1967-69 to conclude his NHL career.

With his 17-man all-star roster, Abel put together lines of Stan Mikita, Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull; Dave Keon, Frank Mahovlich and Rod Gilbert; and Norm Ullman, Alex Delvecchio and Bob Nevin.

If the action was surprisingly weak - "hardly as exciting as an Irish wake," read perhaps the most charitable report - the event was notable for a few items beyond the historic shutout:

The NHL announced expansion to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Minnesota, Oakland and Los Angeles, each paying a franchise fee of $2 million, and signed CBS to a U.S. television deal worth $3.6 million (!) over the next three seasons; Players' talk of a long-sought union gathered steam, the NHLPA created five months later; before 14,284 Forum fans, Henri Richard scored the game winner on Chicago's Glenn Hall 14: 03 into the first period, to be named most valuable player; John Ferguson scored a pair, his first on Hall, his second on New York's Eddie Giacomin with eight seconds to play. But Fergy stole the show in typical fashion, penalized by referee Vern Buffey when he plowed a gloved fist into the beak of the Red Wings centreman Ullman midway through the game.

"(Ullman) slashed me behind the goal and broke my stick," Ferguson said. "Then I hit him with a good shoulder check and he cross-checked me under the chin. So I just zinged him one, right on the nose."

The game was less an exercise in fatigue for Hodge than he'd endured the previous season. The Canadiens lost the 1965 tilt 5-2 at the Forum, Blake rotating Hodge and Worsley roughly every five minutes through the entire game.

This Mutt & Jeff duo led the Canadiens to the Stanley Cup in 1965; it was the fifth of six times Hodge's name would be engraved on the Stanley Cup with Montreal, one more championship to be won in 1992 as a Pittsburgh Penguins scout. His name is spelled four different ways on the sterling bands: C Hodge, CH Hodge, Charles Hodge and Charlie Hodge.

Together in 1966, he and Worsley won the Vézina Trophy for having surrendered the season's fewest goals, two years after Hodge had won it solo.

His first of three career allstar games had come in 1964, shared with Chicago's Glenn Hall in a 3-2 loss to the Cupchampion Toronto Maple Leafs. Imagine: Béliveau scored the all-stars' first goal, assisted by linemates Howe and Bobby Hull.

And Hodge made the record books that night, too: he was penalized by referee John Ashley for intentionally freezing the puck, the first penalty handed to a goaler in all-star history.

"What I mostly recall about the All-Star Game in my day was its intensity," Hodge said. "The players who didn't win the Cup were ticked off about it all summer, and the Cup champion was determined to win.

"It was still an exhibition game, but there was a little more to it than there is now. The pride today is probably a little more of an individual thing. Back then, it was for the team."

In a time when all-star goalies were actually more than clutter in the crease.

dstubbs@ montrealgazette.com twitter.com/habsinsideout1