This is a shot that got by Earl Robertson on the Thursday night of March 23, 1938, when the New York Rangers took on the New York Americans at Madison Square Garden in the second game of their Stanley Cup quarter-final; Ranger centre Clint Smith fired the puck, scoring his second goal of the game, and winning it for the Blueshirts, 4-3. “Rubber?” Harold Parrott wrote in his dispatch for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “Very mention of it gave goaler Earl Robertson of the Amerks the palsy, ague, and jitters today. He saw so many pucks last night he thought it was an endless rubber band the Rangers were snapping at him.”

The Americans did eke out the last laugh in the series, eliminating the Rangers in three games to earn a semi-final meeting with the Chicago Black Hawks. The Hawks won that match-up and went on to defeat the Toronto Maple Leafs to take the Cup.

Robertson, who was born in 1910 on a Thursday of this date in Bengough, Saskatchewan, played six NHL seasons. It was with the Detroit Red Wings that he got his start; his last season was 1941-42, the one for which the New York Americans turned into the Brooklyn Americans, though they continued to play their games in Manhattan. It was the team’s final hurrah, too: after finishing bottom of the league, the Americans suspended operations for the duration of the war, never to return to NHL ice.