LOOK: Hockey finally getting its very own emoji – CBSSports.com

Let’s take a look into the future, say five years from now (maybe next year). There’s going to come a time when someone is going to seriously ask the question, “How did we ever communicate before emojis?” Some of you (and me) may weep at that thought, but there’s no denying that the tiny illustrations have infiltrated everyday electronic communication from tweets to texts and they’re not going anywhere.

As emojis continue to grow in popularity, they continue to grow in options too. However, hockey fans had previously been left out in the cold. Those who just couldn’t talk about the game without bringing a little color (literally) to their online commentary were left to improvise with anything that remotely resembled something hockey-related (the red light was a common one).

But fear not hockey fans, as Emojipedia (via Broad Street Hockey) points out, Unicode Consortium – the emoji kingpins – released a version of Unicode 8.0 Wednesday. There are 37 new emojis including a hockey-specific one.

Ladies and gentlemen, your very first hockey emoji in larger-than-life form via Emojipedia:

Now you can tag all of your hockey tweets with this stick and puck so no one gets confused. Thank goodness.

You’re going to have to wait a little while longer to use the new emojis, though, as they rely on future updates from Apple, Google and Microsoft according to Emojipedia. So hang tight, hockey fans. Your electronic nightmare will be over soon.