“He is Johnny Harms, a 19-year-old lad from Saskatoon, Sask., and hockey being what it is, Johnny could be a personage before the seven-game series runs its course.”

That’s Edward Prell of Chicago’s Tribune appraising the right winger the local Black Hawks called up early in April of 1944 from the AHL’s Hershey Bears to supplement their roster as they prepared to play a final for the Stanley Cup against the Montreal Canadiens.

As it turned out, the rookie Harms would prove a personage, scoring in three of the four games the series lasted as Montreal swept to victory. If his goals were not quite enough to turn things around, they were still noteworthy in their own way. That spring, Harms, who died on a Sunday of this date in 2003 at the age of 77, became the first player in NHL history to score the first three goals of his career in a Stanley Cup final.

He was born in 1925, not in Saskatoon, but northwest of the city, in Battleford, to John Laird and Helen Haubeck. His mother was Cree. He was subsequently adopted by Helen and John Harms, Sr., Dutch Mennonite farmers.

In the second game of the 1944 final, Harms scored Chicago’s only goal as the Black Hawks fell 3-1 to go two games down at the Stadium, cracking Bill Durnan’s shutout with just a second remaining.

Next game he scored his team’s second goal, using Canadiens’ defenceman Glen Harmon as a screen to beat Durnan. (Chicago lost that one 3-2.)

In the fourth and final game, Harms scored while Toe Blake was serving a penalty for crosschecking. His linemates George Allen and Cully Dahlstrom set him up on that one to put the Black Hawks up (briefly) 2-1 … only to see  Canadiens storm back to win 5-4 in overtime to take the Stanley Cup.

Harms stuck around in Chicago the following season, wearing number 9 for the Black Hawks while seeing regular duty on the wing. He collected five goals and ten points in 43 games. That was his last year in the NHL, though he carried on until 1961 in several minor leagues, ending up in British Columbia, where he captained the Vernon Canadians of the Okanagan Senior league to a 1956 Allan Cup championship.