They once brought fear to future Hall of Fame goalies, but are now as common to hockey as helmets, Zambonis and the gap-toothed smile.

Well, gap-toothed smiles aren’t all that common anymore, but you won’t find a hockey player who doesn’t have a curved blade on his or her stick.

It’s hard to remember the time when the hockey stick had a straight blade. But that was also when goalies didn’t wear masks and players shunned helmets.

And scoring goals was a cause for major celebration because it was hard to do.

However, it was literally a lucky break – or rather crack – and the recipe for spaghetti that changed the face of hockey forever.

At a practice in the mid-1960s, Stan Mikita of the Chicago Blackhawks was going onto the ice when the blade of his stick got caught between the gate and the boards.

Then, he heard a “snap!”

“I checked the blade and it was like an “L’ shape with a slight bend,” Mikita said. “I became angry because I had just one stick.”

He couldn’t leave the ice because practice was still going on, and decided to use the stick with the cracked blade.

But he wasn’t pleased about cracking the stick.

“Out of anger, I slammed the puck against the boards,” the Hall of Famer said. “And I noticed the puck had a different sound, a heavier sound than my usual shots.

“And I checked the stick, and the blade was still good.”

So, Mikita shot again. And again. And again.

“The blade still didn’t break,” he said.

Then he did a wrist shot. And another. And another.

The blade finally broke but, by then, practice was about over and Mikita had made a discovery that would revolutionize the game.

After practice Mikita tried to figure out how to curve the stick.

“I got a dozen sticks and started bending them under a door but cracked about six of them,” he said.

“I should’ve known better – my father was a carpenter.”

And here’s where the spaghetti recipe comes in.

“A trainer told me to put them in hot water, like you do spaghetti,” he said. “So I stuck a couple in hot water, took them out and used a chair to bend them overnight.”

The next morning, the curved sticks were ready.

And so was Mikita, who was being watched by curious teammate Bobby Hull.

“He said, “Stanley, what are you doing?”‘ Mikita said. “I told him I want to try this out in practice before unveiling it.”

Hull then put a curve on his blade – “a banana blade,” Mikita said – and goalie Glenn Hall became an unwilling guinea pig in the Blackhawk practices.

“Bobby had a 100 mph slapshot and then he could make it rise,” Mikita said. “I was able to make mine knuckle and drop about a foot.”

The shots frustrated Hall so much, he walked out of practice. “He went to the showers, got dressed and said he was never coming back,” Mikita said.

Mikita led the league in scoring in 1963-64, ’64-’65, ’66-’67 and ’67-’68. The season he didn’t lead the NHL, 1965-66, he finished second – to Hull.

As Mikita and Hull ran roughshod over the NHL with their new weapons, other players began curving their blades as well. But not everyone got the immediate success the two Blackhawks did.

“A lot of guys couldn’t handle the curve,” said former NHL player Terry Crisp, the color analyst for Nashville Predators broadcasts. “It took away their backhand and made them telegraph their moves to the goalie.”

However, Crisp, who played from 1965-1977, wasn’t one of those who switched.

“I never really had a curved stick,” he said. “They were just coming in from Europe when I was on the (New York Islanders).”

The curved blade became widely accepted as the 1970s dawned and the league saw an unprecedented outbreak of scoring.

Before 1970, just four players had scored 100 points in a season – Phil Esposito of Boston, 126 points in 1968; Hull, 107 in 1968; Gordie Howe of Detroit, 103 in 1968; and Bobby Orr of Boston, 120 in 1969.

In just the next three seasons, 12 players hit the 100-point mark and, in the 1975 season alone, nine players had 100 or more points.

“Simply put,” Crisp said of the curved stick, “they were the bane of all goaltenders.”