Hockey Night In Canada has been a national institution since 1952, when Foster Hewitt's familiar "Hello, Canada!" ushered hockey fans into the era of television. It was the greeting he had been using on the radio broadcast of the same name since its first coast-to-coast coverage of a 1933 contest between the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs, coming two years after the radio broadcast of the opening game at the new Maple Leaf Gardens on Carlton Street in downtown Toronto.

The initial Hockey Night In Canada TV broadcast came several months after Hewitt called the play-by-play for the first-ever televised game in Canada, a Memorial Cup contest held at the Gardens in the spring of 1952 that was watched on close-circuit TV by a group of hockey and broadcasting officials. For Hewitt, the game was an opportunity to prove his contention that he could employ the same style of play-by-play for television that he had used on radio. He was right.

Although the early TV experiments were centered around Maple Leaf Gardens, the first NHL game to be televised on CBC was actually a game in Montreal on Oct. 11, 1952, three weeks before Toronto's debut on Nov. 1. Imperial Oil purchased the TV rights for that first season at just $100 per Maple Leafs game, as team owner Conn Smythe wanted to make sure that hockey was as appealing on TV as it was on radio before asking for an appropriate fee. The following season, Imperial purchased the rights to the games for $150,000 a year in a three-year contract. By the early 1960s, after Stafford Smythe had bought out his father's controlling stock in the Gardens, the rights sold for $9 million over six years, or about $21,000 per game.

Among Hewitt's successors as host of Hockey Night In Canada were Ward Cornell, Dave Hodge and Ron MacLean. Hewitt's son, Bill Hewitt, would eventually become a long-time play-by-play man, as did Hockey Hall of Famer Danny Gallivan, who teamed with commentator Dick Irvin in Montreal Canadiens broadcasts for many years. Bob Cole eventually replaced Bill Hewitt, who left due to declining health.

Over the years, Hockey Night In Canada also began to use former NHL players and coaches as game analysts, including Bob Goldham, Howie Meeker, Gary Dornhoefer, John Davidson, Greg Millen, John Garrett and the outspoken Don Cherry, whose "Coach's Corner" intermission segment with Ron MacLean became the highest-rated spot on Canadian television.