Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Après Ski & Other Lessons – The Greatest Hockey Game

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

“They tried to stop us, says the old man. But we kept playing.”We’re talking about winter sports on this week’s episode. We’ve got two stories about hockey – a Dave & Morley story and a listener story exchange. Plus, a back story from Jess about her personal connection to sportswriting and how that informed Stuart’s research for his hockey story.Ad-free listening is here! Listen to the pod ad-free and early, PLUS a whole bunch of other goodies – like virtual parties, Q&As, listener shout-outs & more. Subscribe here: apostrophe.supercast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the apostrophe podcast network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton, and this is backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. Last week on the pod, we talked about winter, and I told you that one of the ways I learned to love winter was I learned to love winter sports. When I moved from Toronto to Chelsea, Quebec, I was not a winter person. I didn't downhill ski. I didn't cross-country ski. I didn't really skate.

I did have Aprae ski down pat. I mean, you've never met someone who is as good at apprae ski as I am. I nail it every time. That part, the eating and drinking part, I had honed that in many downtown restaurants in my 20s. And luckily for me, it's a transferable skill. But the skiing part, that was all new for me. I learned to ski and to love winter later on in my late 20s. And let me tell you, learning how to downhill ski as an adult is no joke.

It's basically paying money, a lot of money, for the privilege of rolling down a mountain with spectators. It's hard to learn as an adult because, I guess because you have further to fall and you have fears to face. kids bounce, but adults brace, or I did. But eventually I got the hang of it, and I learned to love skiing. And with it, I learned to love winter. We're going to talk about winter sports today on the podcast. We've got a story exchange for you, plus a Dave and Morley story set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. But first, first, we've got this.

This is a story exchange sent in by listener Leah Briscoe of Fredericton, New Brunswick. When I was visiting Bridgetown a few Fridays ago, I found myself at a long table full of conversation. Sitting across from me was John Main. John is in his 70s. I'm in my 20s. But we have a lot in common

because we're both from the town of Dundas, Ontario. Pretty soon we got talking about Dundas and how it had won the title of Craft Hockeyville in 2010, and we mused over what improvements they'd be making to the Market Street Arena with a prize money. I told John I'd taken figure skating lessons in the arena in the 1980s. John had an even better story that was set at the same rink in the 1950s. When he was a teenager, John and his friend Dick worked as rink rats at the Market Street Arena. This was before Dundas had a Zamboni.

That meant the ice had to be. be scraped and then flooded using a hand-pulled 45-gallon barrel on wheels. The barrel was filled with hot water and rigged with a hose, piping, and a mat to distribute the water evenly. Doing it the old-fashioned way took time. On Saturday nights after public skating, John and Dick usually worked alone. They'd clean the dressing rooms, sweep the stands, and wouldn't finish scraping and flooding the ice until after midnight. But that's when the fun began. John and Dick would sneak into the Junior B's dressing room

where the players of the local hockey team hung up their gear. John's favorite player was Fred Carter. Dix was Gus Goodale. Once they had Fred's and Gus's pads, skates, and junior B jerseys on, they'd hit the freshly flooded ice and play one-on-one for hours. All it took was a quick flood before they finally went home in the early hours, and no one was the wiser. Or so they thought. In 1980, Frank Westaby, who was manager of the Dundas Arena for 27 years, retired. At his retirement party, Frank told the story of a Saturday night

back in the 1950s when he happened to be passing by the arena at about two in the morning. The lights were on. Curious, he let himself in and snuck to a spot where he could get a view of the ice. There they were. John Main and Dick Pipe dressed from head to toe in their favorite junior B player's gear, skating their hearts out. Frank left them to it, quietly let himself out, and saved the story for almost 30 years. That story came to us from Leah Briscoe of Fredericton, New Brunswick. That was Stuart McLean with a letter from the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange, and that was back from 2011. We're going to take a sharp break now,

but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with that Dave and Morley story I told you about, so stick around. Welcome back. We've got a Dave and Morley story. story for you now. This is Stuart McLean with the greatest hockey game ever played. No one, well certainly not me anyway, is ever going to reconcile to anyone's satisfaction the many and conflicting opinions about which of the thousands and thousands of hockey games ever played on ice was the greatest game of them all. Although if you ever had the chance,

as I have, to raise that question with any of the old-timers who live in the town of Big Narrows in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, you would be told that the matter was settled over a half century ago. For they'd tell you, as they have told me, that the greatest game in hockey history was played in the autumn of 1945. the year the Big Narrows coal miners defeated the Port Arthur shipbuilders to win Cape Breton's one and only Allen Cup, Canada's senior hockey championship. And then as was the tradition for the amateur champion team in those days, the coal miners took off for Europe to represent Canada in the hockey championship of the world. You won't read about it in any record book.

won't read about it anywhere, but you can hear about it in the narrows. That's right, says Smith Gardner, who you can find on any Thursday afternoon, sitting at the table in the window that overlooks the river at the breakwater hotel in Big Narrows. Smith and his buddies get together for a pint or two every Thursday, and if you happen to show up,

they'd be more than happy to tell you about the game. They know more about it than anyone else alive. Allow me to introduce them. There's Smith, of course, a pretty good hockey player himself. Though he was way too young to play in the game I'm going to tell you about, Smith is in his early 80s today. Sitting across from him with his back to the window is Arnie Gallagher. Arnie's in his late 70s, as nearest anyone can figure,

more or less runs the narrows out of his storefront on Water Street. Arnie's the town's combination florist, travel agent, and funeral director. Just tell me where you want to go, Arnie likes to say. And I'll get you there dead or alive. Arnie is also the fire chief and ex-mare. To Arnie's right, nearest the front door, the guy fiddling with a silver cigarette case. That's Russell Montgomery, the ancient bird-like town librarian. He is 94 years old and long retired from the library, but sound of mind still.

He's the town's undisputed historian. And the fourth guy, the older gentleman, the one wrapped in the blanket. Well, he's the only one at the table who was on the team. he was there, though he doesn't talk about it often. Well, that's because they hushed it all up, says Smith. If you look to the record books, it says they didn't even play for the Allen Cup in 45 on account of the war.

Well, that's a load of malarkey. They played all the other war years, and by the spring of 45, everyone knew the war was all but over. They played. Now, we won, fair and square. It's what happened in your world. Europe that made them go all hush, hush on the thing. Smith is right.

They did play in 45, and the team from the Narrows did win. Darn right we did, says Smith. The Governor General was there to present the trophy. Actually, he wasn't. It was actually Hugh Andrew Montague Allen himself, the man who donated the Allen Cup, who called it in a being and for whom. it was and is still named. He was 84 years old that night, probably the richest man in Canada,

although all the money in the world couldn't protect him from the ravages of those grimy war years. His two daughters, 15-year-old Gwen and 16-year-old Anna, both drowned when the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat. His 20-year-old Eaton-educated son, Hugh, was shot dead over the English Channel three years later. Only his fourth daughter lived into adulthood, but she died when she was 47, leaving the old man childless, with nothing else to do that lonely Saturday

than to present the trophy that bore his name. But that isn't the night they'll tell you about around that table in Big Narrows. It was the game in Finland, says Smith, not the ones in Montreal. Norway, says Russell Montgomery, the librarian,

correcting him. They won the Allen Cup in the spring, says Russell. They went to Norway in the fall. They left in August, says Smith, trying to keep pace. Sail for Newcastle. They left in September,

says the librarian. Sail for Liverpool. They left right after the armistice. They played in November in the port town of Bergen on the Atlantic Ocean. So do I have your attention? Can I make my case? This game I want you to hear about should be considered. This forgotten moment of hockey history was,

I would put forward the most elegant, enchanting, and service. It certainly whimsically concluded hockey game ever, and it should at least be on the table. There were eight teams in that forgotten European tournament. England, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, that's four. Sweden, that's five. A group of dubious pedigree who claimed to represent France. That's six. Canada, of course, represented by the coal miner.

by the coal miners, that's seven, and Czechoslovakia, the Czechs, who had been crushed by Germany, divided and annexed. The government was in exile until late 45, and they were in no shape to send a hockey team that year. But it was a point of pride. After those years of occupation and oblivion, the Czechs were there. Yes, they were. Yes, they were. were, says Smith, picking up his glass and taking a sip and then staring down at it and falling into silence. All of them quiet now. We have to be patient with these four old guys. They've known each other far too long to be hurried along, even by the moon-deep prodding of silence. Eventually Arnie will take a sip of his beer, set a day.

and say, when I was a kid, our mothers used to put baked potatoes into our skates, hot right out of the oven. And we'd walk to the pond in those days, and when we got there, our skates would be warm on account of the potatoes. So we'd put our skates on and put the potatoes in the snow, and the potatoes would freeze, and when they froze, we'd use the potatoes as pucks. We'd eat them on the way home, cold. Everybody at the table is nodding earnestly, except for the old guy in the blanket who barks, What the heck's that got to do with anything? I'm just saying, says Arty,

that it's a different game when you play it out of doors. Everyone knows that, says the old guy. Arnie says, I'm saying there are things to consider when you play out of doors, like the ice and the wind, for one. That's two, mutters. the old guy. For crying out loud, says Smith, he has his hand on the old guy's shoulder.

He's looking around for their waiter. Can we have some refills here? Says Smith. Someone's getting grumpy. The waiter comes over and sets down another round of drafts. The old guy picks up a knife and runs it across the top

of his glass, pushing the foam onto the tabletop. He picks up a salt shaker and salts his beer. And then he bends down and takes a sip without touching the glass. He looks around the table and scowls, and they all fall silent again. The point, of course, isn't the cold or the wind, or how they used to change ends halfway through the last period

so everyone had the wind at their back for an equal amount of time, so it was fair. The point is the autumn in 1945. The autumn after the Big Narrows coal miners won the Allen Cup in Montreal, and Montague Allen presented it to them, and they took the train to New York City and got on the RMS Mauritania and sailed for Europe to play in the championships of the world. The first game of that series was on 7th November, says Russell Montgomery,

25 below zero and windy. They stepped on to the ice and, wait a minute, wait a minute, says Arnie. How many guys went? They all look at the old guy, but the old guy has nodded off. There were, in fact, 11 of them on that team, 12 counting the coach. And what I know is this. They got to England a week or so. before the first game.

Down the duffel bag gangplank at dawn, onto the gray, bomb-scarred Liverpool docks. Five of the 11 had served overseas. Augie, McDonnell in France, moose and spit in Italy. Archie got as far as England, but never got to the continent. So you can understand, perhaps,

that they were edgy that morning. The vets who had more or less just got home didn't want to be back, didn't want any part of the war anymore. And the ones who had stayed home, they were guilty. They had missed it. Well, they all felt guilty. They'd all survived. And they all knew someone who hadn't.

They went from Liverpool to Oslo by ferry or something, and then to Bergen by truck. and they arrived just in time for the first game. They hadn't had their skates on since the Allen Cup, which meant they hadn't skated for maybe six months. The Bergen rink was outside. And of course, it being so close to the end of the war, there were no lights or anything.

Everything was rationed. So the games were played during the day, a couple in the morning and a couple in the afternoon. In their first game, which was that afternoon they arrived, the coal miners played Switzerland. Before the game, they watched a bunch of Norwegian guys and blue fisherman sweaters shovel the rink. And then, in the midst of all that gray post-war gloom, the most magical thing happened. A chestnut draft horse pulling an ornate, wheeled watering machine, was led onto the ice. The horse came from Russia, the contraption from Italy.

It looked like a float from a parade. It had an etched brass firebox to heat the water. And as it circled the rink, it hissed and billed like a circus calliope. A man sitting on the top back, was playing an organ. The problem was it was so windy that the water froze in little waves, like on a beach when the sea pulls back from the sand

and it leaves layers of water behind. The players watched the ice machine in absolute awe. When it was done, they stepped onto the uneven surface and skated around, a stumbling on the wavy bits. and then the Swiss team came out. They looked tough, said Aki McDonnell under his breath. Their blue wool jerseys had a broad yellow stripe across the shoulders, little crests on the front and big numbers on the back.

A good third of them were wearing leather helmets. They looked like a team of fighter pilots. It sat the boys. off balance, the heavy shadow of the war everywhere, the bombed out ruins of all the cities, the wounded veterans in all the cafes, everything looked gray and tired and unshaven. So, Archie McDougal, who played the entire game that afternoon, won the opening face off and stuffed the puck back to whomever it was on defense. He headmanned it up to Augie, and And Augie carried it to the blue line and then dumped it into the Swiss corner.

And that's when it hit them. Snap! Augie goes in after the puck, and it was like he had skated off the rink and onto the harbor. The rink was nearly twice the size of the rinks they were used to. Augie's going in and he's going in and he's going in. He's going in forever. He's fighting the wind off the North Sea all away. And when he finally...

makes it to the corner, he turns to look for the net, and the net so far away, Augie nearly faints. They were used to playing a lane game. They were used to skating up and down the lanes like players on a tabletop set. They soon learned if they stayed in their lanes. Well, the forwards could barely see the guys on the other side of the rink. And as for defense, back home, you played just off the boards. and anyone tries to go around you, you took a step and pushed them into the boards.

Here, you play close to the boards like at home. There was one mother of a hole down the middle. At the end of the first period, the Swiss were beating them four to one. Guys are good, said Archie, in between periods. End of the game, it was Switzerland seven, coal miners too. and it should have been more. They lost their first two games, that one against the Swiss, and the next against the Norwegians.

But then they beat the Brits and the dubious guys from France. And they seemed to find their confidence. And to make a long story short, when all was said and done, the championship of the world, 1945, came down to the Cape Breton, coal miners against the checks. The final game was scheduled for a Saturday afternoon. First, there was a big breakfast, cooked outside over a fire. At least 500 people showed up. More,

says the old man in the blanket, waking up leaning forward. There were thousands all around the rink and up on the roof. At the end of the third period, this is the part we're not supposed to talk about, says the old man. It is Russell Montgomery, the old librarian who stares him down, says, if we don't talk about it, who's going to? Someone should talk about it. What happened is this.

They played three flawless periods of hockey, perfect hockey. Each team play in their own game. The Canadians dumping the puck into the corner and skating in and digging it out. The checks carrying it across the blue line. If they didn't see their way across it, they turned around and headed back to their own end and started again. The game rolling back from one end of the rink to the other. The shots that made it to the net perfectly precise. The goalies.

precisely perfect. When regulation time ended, they were tied. Zero, zero. So the ref called them together and explained, because they were also tied in total tournament goals, they were going to overtime. That was the rule. They could go to the dressing room and get warm,

and in 15 minutes they'd come back out and play a sudden death overtime period. team that scored the first goal would be the champion of the world. So there they were. Three weeks and three periods into it. Sitting on the rough wood benches in the dressing room that they shared. Two teams, one wood stove. Staring at each other in their sweat-soaked wool jerseys,

each sweater a couple of pounds heavier than it was at the beginning of the game. Augie was running his hand up and down his stick, a solid piece of ironwood. The old guy looks around the table. He's staring at each of them. You have to understand, he says, very quietly. Everything was so different. The whole of Europe was devastated. Russell Montgomery spoke next.

He says, The idea of sudden death had no appeal to any of you. The old man nods his head. They all knew too much about sudden death. They all knew too much about the cost of victory and the price of defeat. The soldier boys and the boys who hadn't served, they had all, each one of them, Canadian and Czech, Norwegian and Brett, seen too many of their friends set off on voyages of hope that had ended on the hopeless sea of history. The old man snorts. History, says the old man.

We had no time for history. So this is what happened. They came out for the overtime period. And the people watching watched in stunned silence as they skated out, all of them, and dropped their sticks at Santa Rice. And then Augie and the check captain stood there picking the sticks up and throwing them randomly, one stick to one end of the rink and one to the other. The players went and found which end their sticks had landed. And when they did, that was the end they'd defend. Before they began playing, they skated to Santa Rice again and changed sweaters. So in the rubble of the war, the two teams who played the overtime period for the champion

ship of the world were a made-up mishmash. Some from this side and some from that. Some checks and some Canadians. The overtime period was no more than a giant, joyful game of shitty. They tried to stop us, says the old man. But we kept playing. They had come to seek honor and they had decided there could be no honor if winning meant one of them had to lose. The period lasted for hours. People who were there said it was the greatest hockey they'd ever seen. There wasn't a whistle. It was pure hockey. No penalties, no power plays, just the puck and play after memorable play, some of the best players in the world, some of the most perfect hockey ever. The officials were furious. There was a meeting that night. They threatened to expel Canada and Czechoslovakia

from international competition. But there was some sort of deal struck that involved secret money, and part of the deal was everyone promised not to talk about what had happened, and no one ever did, which is why you've never heard of it. But it happened. The old librarian leans forward and looks at the old man in the blanket. What I always wondered was how it happened. Whose idea was it? It was Augie, right? I always figured it was Augie. The man in the blanket laughs. You want to know the truth? He says. I'll tell you the truth. It doesn't matter anymore. no one cares anymore. It wasn't Augie.

It wasn't any of our guys. Or any of the checks either. It was Sir Allen, Sir Monagieu Allen, who had met them at the Allen Cup, and when news of the European tournament reached his desk, had not only paid their way across the ocean, but had gone with them.

His last hurrah. Sir Allen, who had lost two dollars, daughters and one son in the first war had gone into the dressing room after the third period and said the right end would be to end it right here. One should play for the game, he said, not for a flag. The old man in the blanket shrugs. Someone translated for the checks. They all felt the same way. They needed Sir Allen to say it. But when he did, they shook hands in the dressing room and they went back onto the ice and they changed sweaters. That's the truth, says the old man.

That's what happened. Then he says, later, some of the fellas regretted we did that. Some of them were ashamed. But it was a long time. ago and they're all gone now. I'm not ashamed. I don't regret anything. I played in the greatest game of hockey ever played. What's to regret? He looks around at the mall and then he takes a sip of his beer and he falls back to sleep. If you look at the record books, you'll see they didn't play the world championship the next year. But when they got it going again in 1947, you'll also see that Czechoslovakia won, and then Canada the year after that. Then Czechoslovakia the year after and then Canada after that.

A person who knows what you know now might wonder if they were trading back and forth on purpose, as if they were trying to preserve the spirit of that fantastic game in Bergen. Some people say that is exactly what was going on. And they say old Montague Allen had his hands all over it. He died in 1951 and that's when it more or less ended. Canada won once or maybe twice more, but Sweden won the next year. Then the Soviet Union the year after. We'll never know about that.

But this much is true. There was this brief moment of complete. purity. That afternoon in Bergen, on the edge of the deep gray ocean, when the winds of peace were blowing instead of the winds of war. And the ice was as hard and as fast as ice has ever been. And young men played like young boys, the black puck skimming over the hard white ice like nothing bad had ever happened. Like no one. ever died, as if life was made for laughter. And there could be great victory without great defeat. That was the story we call the greatest hockey game ever played. We recorded that story in

Kingston, Ontario back in 2013. I can't hear that story without thinking about my dad, Steve Milton. So much of that story came from him. Stuart and my dad were the same age, both born in 1948, both writers. My dad's a sports writer, a columnist, a really good one. He's written hundreds, probably thousands of columns over the years, and about 25 books, all of them about sports. Over time, Stuart and my dad became pretty close. They had their own friendship totally separate from me. and they talked a lot about writing.

And whenever Stewart was working on a story that touched sports, something like the Olympics or the Allen Cup or amateur hockey, he'd call my dad. And when he wrote that story, the one you just heard, he called him a lot. He asked about the Allen Cup, about the players, about the rink, about the feel of the ice, about the difference between European hockey and North American hockey, the way the players moved, the way they filled the space. That's one of the reasons that story feels so real because it is real.

After it aired, two of my friends, both of whom are former pro athletes called me up and they said the same thing. Did your dad help Stewart with that story? They knew he had because it was so bang on, so honest. And yeah, he did help. That's the thing about Stewart. If he didn't know something, he asked. He asked and he asked and he asked and he asked until he did. know about it. I got my start in sports too. What do they call that these days? A Nepo baby? Yeah,

that was me. My dad helped me get my very first job in the business, working at the score, the sports television station. I wasn't super into sports, but it had permeated my entire life. Sports were kind of the background music of my childhood. My dad traveled with the Toronto Blue Jays. He was a beat writer, which meant he was at every single game, flying on the team playing, road trips, clubhouses, dugouts. He started when I was seven, I think, and that became our family rhythm, the baseball schedule. Away games meant my dad was away, and home games meant we saw him more often. That's just how things worked. And here's the thing I didn't realize until way later, like much too much later. When I started working at the vinyl cafe, touring across the country, I was kind of

following in my dad's footsteps. I didn't see it at the time. Our jobs felt so different. He had stats, and I had stories. He had stadiums. I had stages. He had dugouts. I had dressing rooms. But the rhythm was the same. We were both always packing, always gone, and always coming back. all those nights on the team bus or the tour bus gathering stories, trying to make sense of a person through all the quiet in-between moments. When you live out on the road, you really start to notice the connective tissue because that's where you live your life in the connective tissue. The game, or in my case, the show, the game is great, but it's not really a lot. your thing. That's the fans thing or the audiences thing. Your thing is all the stuff around the thing. And when you spend enough time there, you start to see the patterns. Great sports writers write

from that place. They care less about a single moment in a single game and more about what it means and how those moments add up, how they fit into the greater story about the player, about a team, maybe even about life itself. Life is a mountain of little moments. You never know which one's going to count. And in a way, most of them don't. But when you add them all up, they all count. When I hear that story now, the one you just heard,

that story about the Allen Cup, I hear Stewart, of course, but I hear my dad in there too. That's the thing about good stories. They connect us. They remind us who we came from and who we carry with us. All right, that's it for today. But we'll be back here next week with more from Dave and Morley. Dave's relationship with hospitals over the years has not been, well, without problems. Why the very first time Dave and Morley were in a hospital together, David fainted, flat cold.

It was a week or so before Stephanie was born. They'd gone with their birthing class, the big tour. And halfway through it, the tour, when they were led into the actual birthing room, and Dave came face to face with the moment of truth with the birthing table. His knees had buckled and he had staggered against the green cement wall. Three of the other fathers picked him up and carried him across the room and laid him out on the table

it was Ron the class clown who would put Dave's feet into the stairs come on said Dave that was over 20 years ago because what said Morley things have changed since then it isn't that Dave is a full-blown hypochondriac

Morley'd never say that he isn't But there's no denying he has hypocondriical tendencies. And those tendencies mixed with his, well with his personality, those tendencies tend to get him into trouble. There was, for instance, the time he inhaled the fly. He became convinced that the fly was alive in his lungs, was colonizing his lungs. We know this because Dave's friend Kenny Wong caught him in the record store late one night.

After closing hours, Dave had a lamp over on the counter by the cash. He had taken the shade off the lamp. He had the lamp on and he was hovering over the lit bulb, his mouth wide open. Kenny looked at him and said, it's moths that are attracted to life. Dave said, you're right. What are flies attracted to? There was the time in the drug store when Dave got himself trapped

in the cuff of the blood pressure chair All his friends gathered around him friends and neighbors watching the machine and his blood pressure inch up They waited until They waited until his nose started bleeding Before they called the fire department Have to cut him out with the jaws of life

That's next week on the podcast I hope you'll join us Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe as part of the apostrophe podcast network. The recording engineer is Junior B. Greg DeCleut. The music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeClute, and me, Jess Milton.

Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now. Oh, Greg's complaining about not being in the pro leagues.