Last week, Graham Reid named his first squad since taking over at the helm of the Australian men’s hockey team, with a view towards December’s Champions Trophy in India.

The squad of 27 players featured no fewer than four Tasmanians. Victoria (population eight times that of Tasmania) could only manage three and South Australia none, but let’s not go there.

Those four players were Olympians Eddie Ockenden and Tim Deavin plus fellow internationals Nick Budgeon and Jeremy Edwards, three of whom were fresh from helping the Tassie Tigers to their historic maiden Australian Hockey League title just a couple of days earlier.

Down 2-0 with 25 minutes remaining to a West Australian side that had beaten it 5-1 just 24 hours earlier, coach Glenn Freeman’s team executed the sort of sporting turnaround destined to make a Hollywood movie in which Kevin Costner fails dismally to get anywhere near an Aussie accent and Jim Carrey attempts to reprise Deavin’s infamous canoe goal celebration.

Two minutes after Sam McCambridge had trickled Tassie back into the contest, Ockenden (Costner) was served up a penalty corner of abysmal proportions but somehow conjured up a fearsome reverse stick equaliser from the edge of the circle — the sort of once-in-a-normal-lifetime shot that Ockenden produces on a regular basis.

This took the contest to a penalty shoot-out in which Ockenden not only hit the high-pressure conversion that kept his team alive, but doubled up with the winner seconds later.

The victory was every bit the hockey equivalent of the state’s cricketing namesake winning its maiden Sheffield Shield title in 2007.

Like cricket, Tasmanian hockey has had an increasingly busy production line of national players.

Since Penny Dunbabin represented Australia in Los Angeles in 1984, Tasmanian hockey players have graced six of the seven Olympic Games with Maree Fish and Matthew Wells helping claim golds in Seoul and Athens respectively with bronze medals also won by Daniel Sproule (twice), Wells (twice), Ockenden (twice), David Guest and Deavin (Carrey).

It is hard to see how Ockenden’s year could have gone any better.

Alongside Budgeon, he helped Australia retain its Sultan Azlan Shah title (scoring in the final); alongside Deavin, he won his second straight World Cup; then came his nation’s fifth straight Commonwealth Games title (scoring in the final) before being crowned the AHL player of the tournament (scoring in the final).

Add to all that Amelia Spence being named in the latest Hockeyroos squad; Kurt Mackey and Josh Beltz invited to a national training camp in November; Beltz, Benji Austin, Jayden Pearson, Maddy Hinton and Madeline Murphy selected to Hockey Australia’s talent identification program; and Austin in the Australian under-21 team that yesterday defeated New Zealand to claim the bronze medal at the Sultan of Johor Cup in Malaysia.

The analogy with Tasmanian cricket is apt, and not just because both men’s teams are called the Tigers.

Just as the likes of James Faulkner, George Bailey and Xavier Doherty have benefited from the success of national captain Ricky Ponting, who in turn followed trailblazer David Boon, so Deavin, Budgeon and Edwards have benefited from the success of national captain Ockenden, who in turn followed trailblazers Daniel Sproule and Matthew Wells.

As mentor Tim Coyle was to the Bailey-Faulkner generation, so TIS hockey coach Andrew McDonald has been to the Ockenden-Deavin era. Whether the 2014 AHL crown leads to a similar dynasty of success as the 2007 Sheffield Shield remains to be seen, but, like the state’s cricketers and cyclists, Tasmanian hockey players are in safe hands and enjoying producing storylines infinitely superior to Costner’s 1989 effort Field of Dreams.