The Chicago Black Hawks weren’t supposed to beat the Montreal Canadiens in the playoffs in 1938. When they did, moving on the meet the New York Americans — well, no way they’d get past the Americans. Facing the young, fast, hard-hitting Toronto Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Finals that April, Chicago was almost everybody’s underdog. Steered by an American-born rookie (and MLB umpire), 43-year-old Bill Stewart, the Hawks dispensed with the mighty Leafs in five games. Marc McNeil was summed it up the morning after in his column in Montreal’s Gazette: “So today, after accomplishing one upset victory after another, the Chicago team stands on top of the pro hockey world, a phenomenon for the rest of the NHL to contemplate with vast astonishment, no little awe, and deep respect.”

Missing from their triumph, which unfolded on the ice at Chicago’s Stadium on a Tuesday night: the Stanley Cup itself. Instead of receiving the silverware they’d earned and parading it around the ice, the Hawks … didn’t. The Cup simply wasn’t there. Instead, they hoisted their coach, wrenching his arm in so doing. Charles Bartlett of The Chicago Tribune was at the scene to see that, reporting that “the little Yankee avers that at the moment he doesn’t care if he loses an arm, or both.”

Where was the Cup? There was talk that it had been shipped to Toronto on the assumption that the Leafs would win the fifth game to force a sixth back on their home ice. In Chicago, it was alleged that it was all a nefarious scheme cooked up by Toronto manager Conn Smythe — which, come to think of it, is entirely plausible. In fact, the Cup was in Detroit, under the care of the two-time defending champions. Shipped west direct from the jeweler who’d been tasked with hammering out the dents and giving it a polish, what the Tribune heralded as “an antiquated bit of silverware denoting world hockey supremacy” arrived in Chicago on the Thursday. So the Black Hawks had their visit then. Some of them had other celebratory business to attend to: defenceman Roger Jenkins, for one, had promised goaltender Mike Karakas that he’d trundle him up Chicago’s State Street in a wheelbarrow if they won the Cup. He did that, with (according to one report) “thousands of onlookers cheering he perspiring Jenkins during a block-long journey.” (Historian Eric Zweig has more on this on his website, here.)

And the Cup? It spent the following week not far from there, on display in a corner window at Marshall Field’s, the big Chicago department store on State Street.