Rangers v. Maroons

Lawrence Stanley, Governor General of Canada in the early nineties, put up a cup to be held for a year by the hockey team that won the world's championship. After each series of games the cup is filled with champagne and each player on the winning team takes a drink out of it. It is a battered cup. It has been dropped in trains and automobiles; players have scratched their names on it with penknives. Last week in Montreal the Stanley Cup was once more filled and passed around and the team that drank out of it was the New York Rangers.

No one had expected the Rangers to win; they were facing many handicaps. Light and fast, they had to play the toughest, heaviest team in hockey, the Maroons of Montreal. It was hard to see how flashy skaters like Frank Boucher, Ranger centre, or Bill Cook and his brother Bun, the wings, could stand being bumped around by checks like Siebert, Button, Smith. The Rangers were playing all their games away from home. In the second game their goalie's eye was cut open and Lester Patrick, manager and coach, a star defense man 20 years ago, put on the pads and got in goal himself. After this game (TIME, April 16), the president of the National Hockey league appointed a new goalie for the Rangers--Joe Miller, late of the Americans.

Miller has never been popular. The people who look down from the roof of Madison Square Garden at hockey games had given him a nickname--"Red Light" Miller, drawing their title from the signal that flashes when a goal-guard lets in a shot. They had given Miller what is locally known as the Bronx Cheer, a huzzah of sarcastic intention. Rattled, Miller begged to be sent back to the minor leagues "where they wouldn't razz him." Now he was called to take the most important position on a team tied with the favorites for the hockey championship of the world.

In a situation that might have been borrowed from a sporting story in a boys' magazine, Miller proved himself the Boy Who Made Good. In his first game, the third of the series, he made many brilliant saves; in the next game he kept the Maroon team without a score. The Rangers, who had won by a single goal, carried Miller off the ice on their heads as, in Manhattan, the baseball fans had carried Cohen.

Twelve thousand people sat around the rink as the players skated out for the deciding game. Big French-Canadians from the east side of Montreal (the French side) were there to cheer the Rangers, disliking the Maroons for beating the Canadians. And in a furious game in which, when the referee disallowed a Montreal goal, the crowd threw overcoats, hats, papers, garbage, and bottles on the ice--in which Miller whirled his arms and legs like the sails of a mill, threw himself backward and forward, stopped every shot except one--a game in which 21 penalties were given, Frank Boucher stabbed twice through the Maroon defense. No team representing an American city has won an important hockey trophy since Seattle took the Stanley Cup title in 1917. All the players on the Rangers are Canadians.