The original Ottawa Senators were the NHL’s original model franchise. They made that evident no later than March 31, 1923, becoming the fledgling league’s first tenant to win three Stanley Cups.
For the latter half of the month, Vancouver’s Denman Arena emboldened its image as the Sens’ home away from home. As the host site of the 1921 Stanley Cup Final, it had born witness to Ottawa’s previous championship. This year, the visitors from Canada’s capital topped the PCHA champion Vancouver Maroons, 3-1, in a best-of-five play-in.
That triumph gave Ottawa the right to face the WCHL’s Edmonton Eskimos on Denman’s suddenly neutral pond. The NHL ambassador improved to 7-3 in its last 10 games there with a 2-1 overtime victory in Game 1 of the best-of-three championship.
With a 1-0 squeaker in Game 2, the Sens secured their third grail in four seasons. That gave them one more than the Toronto Arenas/St. Pats franchise, which had tied their mark of two the year prior.
Ottawa added a fourth in 1927, and would not be surpassed on the NHL’s all-time Cup count until 1945. By then the Maple Leafs, Toronto won its fifth title under the league’s auspices that year.
With that, Ottawa’s resultant reign in the record book would last much longer than another bar-setting feat attained on the other side of the continent.
Much is made in modern times of the “war of attrition” glory-hungry pucksters put themselves through. It is thus only fitting that a Cup-clinching game coincided with another competitive pain-for-pleasure headline generator.
While it has no glamourized trophy or protracted chronicle, marathon dancing spawned momentary international fever in the 1920s and ’30s. And on March 31, 1923, Alma Cummings became an American pioneer of sorts by explicitly seeking to eclipse a British record holder.
Shortly before 10 p.m. local time in New York City that evening, Cummings completed a 27-hour marathon. Her reign would last merely 12 days, though, as Clevelander Helen Mayer shattered the mark with a 52-hour, 16-minute torrent on April 12.
Accounts of each woman’s determined dance-a-thon underscored the price and the payoff. When Cummings finally took a breather, a band of bystanders burst into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Although it was also impossible to overlook the mess brought on by the coffee that kept her and spectators going.
Beyond Mayer’s streak, which nearly doubled the length of Cummings’, a handful of other head-turning marathons carried on for at least three full days at a time. Not surprisingly, self-evident and credibly predicted health detriments from such activity soon raised red flags. The tolls on the soles of one’s feet, along with cardiac concerns, were not the least of those worries.
As such, while the fad outlasted the record that gave it stronger legs on March 31, 1923, it would die out well before Toronto could eclipse Ottawa as the NHL’s most frequent Cup-holder.
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