Ice Kings, a film about the Mount St. Charles Academy hockey team’s unprecedented 26-year state championship winning streak, will be shown at 9 tomorrow night at the Columbus Theatre in Providence.

In March 2004 the Mount St. Charles Academy’s men’s ice hockey team was defeated for the state championship high school title after an unprecedented 26-year consecutive run.

In his incisive documentary, Ice Kings, showing tomorrow at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, producer-director Craig E. Shapiro has captured the history of the Woonsocket school’s team, its amazing successes under head coach Bill Belisle and his assistant coach son Dave Belisle, the lead up to the end of Mount’s reign and, indeed, the history of ice hockey in Rhode Island. As Shapiro and some of his hockey-loving interviewees see it, hockey is to the state what high school football is to Texas.

And so it seems in footage of devoted, screaming fans that lined up in the cold for tickets and packed the arenas. It’s a scene that’s echoed in footage from the 1940s and ’50s at the old Rhode Island Auditorium on North Main Street, former home of the Reds.

Shapiro has fashioned a lively film that will appeal mainly to hockey fans of Mount and of Toll Gate High School, which wrested the crown from them. He interviews current and former coaches, and former players from Mount and Toll Gate, many of whom went on to pro hockey careers. Their anecdotes offer colorful and sometimes humorous background on the teams; Shapiro keeps it lively by cutting between this talking-heads stuff and archival footage of key games and players on the ice.

Perhaps the best part is seeing how some of these former players and coaches can recall key plays that happened 40 or more years earlier as if it were yesterday. It’s kind of like old soldiers telling war stories and, in a way, it is. The hockey games were approached with the fervor and tactics of an army on the move.

The final 15 minutes of Ice Kings recounts the lead-up to the end-of-an-era loss against Toll Gate and some of the key plays in the championship games. It was, as one participant says, “the upset of the century.” Tradition dies hard.

Ice Kings will be screened at 9 p.m. tomorrow at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence, as part of the Rhode Island International Film Festival.