Any guesses, based solely on the faces in the photograph, on who was the victor on the night depicted here, and who the vanquished?

If there’s something you’re seeing in Bill Durnan’s smile on the left that suggests that he prevailed at Maple Leaf Gardens on Saturday, April 19, 1947, well, then, um, sorry, you’re mistaken. The triumphant grin is, in fact, Turk Broda’s on the right. And why not? With their 2-1 win over Montreal, he and his Toronto Maple had just won the Stanley Cup in six games.

Many who witnessed the action that night agreed that the rival goaltenders were the two best men on the ice. By no surprise, Montreal’s Gazette chose to focus on the man in the bleu, blanc, et rouge in the aftermath. “The greatest goalkeeper of modern times, and perhaps of all time,” columnist Dink Carroll proclaimed the 31-year-old Durnan, who wasn’t (it has to be said) always so happy in his goaltending gear as he appears to be here. “If it hadn’t been for his uncanny skill in keeping the puck out of the net, the Leafs might have won by four or five goals.” Broda, Carroll allowed, was good, too — though “the Habitant sharpshooters made his task a little easier by hitting him with the puck when they were all alone with him.”

Durnan did win two Stanley Cups with Montreal, in 1944 and ’46. He also won the Vézina Trophy, as the NHL’s top goaltender, in six of his seven seasons in the league. Born in Toronto on a Saturday of this date in 1916, Durnan died at the age of 56 in October of 1972 — just a week, as it so happened, after Turk Broda’s death at 58.