I'm old enough to remember maskless NHL goalies (IIRC, Glenn Hall was the last of the breed). It wasn't pretty. And Terry Sawchuk's mask when he finally started wearing one, with all of the stitches he had gotten, and all of the stitches he would have gotten, painted on. And - remember that the first masks were basically just a fibreglass face covering with nearly zero padding - Jacques Plante spending a significant part of the late '60s and early '70s unconscious on the ice.... again (he stopped a lot of pucks with his face).
