All due respect, Peter, but that's just not the case. It was true, within a short window of time from the late '60s to the late '70s,
when expansion saw the number of major league teams increase from a mere six to more than thirty in that decade --
the dilution of talent allowed some guys who'd been among the roughly 120 best before 1967 to continue to compete effectively
among a major-league landscape that soon included over 600. But before that, back to the 19th-century dawn of hockey,
and then afterwards, since the 1980s, it's always been unusual to have guys playing too much past their early 30s.
Players like Jagr today, or Howe even then, are extremely rare exceptions.
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