This is your brain on hockey

[David Harding]

This article from the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" reports a study of hockey players, serious hockey fans, and non-fans and purports to "provide evidence that specialized (sports) motor experience enhances action-related language understanding by recruitment of left dorsal lateral premotor cortex, a region normally devoted to higher-level action selection and implementation — even when there is no intention to perform a real action."  In other words, watching a hockey game has the same effect on your brain as playing it (minus the concussions, I suppose).