Hockey has always been a part of my life.

I played growing up, had a brief stint as a professional goalie in Europe, and even after hanging up my skates, somehow found my way back to the game—this time with a camera in my hands. For the past 17 seasons, I've had the privilege of photographing NHL games, a privilege I still have today.

Then hockey came around again, this time through my son, Liam.

Around the age of 12, he decided to make a serious run at becoming a goalie. For the past four years, he's played at the AAA level and is still going strong today at U17 AAA in Edmonton.

Shortly after the pandemic, the two of us started collecting goalie rookie cards together—probably the worst possible time from a pricing standpoint, but we didn't really care. It was fun.

The idea seemed simple enough: collect a rookie card of every goaltender who has ever played in an NHL game.

How hard could that be?

At first, I bought inexpensive cards for the two of us. Before long, Liam grew bored with the collecting side of it and understandably wanted to focus more on actually stopping pucks than collecting pictures of people who did.

I kept going.

The collection grew into bigger purchases, rarer cards, and eventually something far beyond a collection. It became a research project for me. Liam still enjoyed hearing the updates, discoveries, and stories about the position—he just wasn't particularly interested in owning all the cards. In fact, I think things got strange for him when we got the Kevin Nastiuk and Allen York rookie cards. You see, around that time these retired Pro Goalies were actually his coaches. It was odd to Liam that Nasty and Yorkie were being collected by his Dad.

As the years passed, I discovered that many NHL goaltenders never received a traditional rookie card. That realization sent me down the rabbit hole of team-issued postcards, signed index cards, AHL and minor-league releases, junior and college issues, and virtually any collectible that could represent a goalie's earliest appearance.

Every time I thought the archive was complete, another obscure goalie surfaced, and the search began again.

Along the way, I've made just about every mistake a collector can make. I've bought overgraded cards, overpaid simply because a card almost never appears for sale, made money on some purchases and lost plenty on others.

I've even spent more than $125 on a card that might only be worth fifty cents—because sometimes the only way to convince someone to dig through a forgotten box is to make it worth their time.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that rarity doesn't always equal value. Some incredibly difficult goalie rookie cards are surprisingly inexpensive, while others command astonishing prices. Collecting isn't always logical—and that's exactly what makes it so enjoyable.

Today, the Goalie Archive continues to evolve. I'm constantly upgrading cards and, occasionally, even downgrading them when I find an example that better represents what I'm trying to build. Every season, the archive grows again as new goaltenders make their NHL debuts.

At this point, I'm very confident that I have every NHL goaltender represented in the archive.

But I'm not arrogant enough to believe I've found everything.

There are more than a century's worth of obscure sets, regional issues, team postcards, minor-league releases, and forgotten collectibles out there. That's part of what makes this project so interesting.

If you know of a goaltender who played in the NHL and isn't represented here—or if you have information about a goalie rookie card, obscure issue, or early collectible I may have missed—I genuinely want to hear from you, and so does Liam, but only the story, not necessarily the card.

Because the search is never really over.

And you might be the person who finds the next missing piece.