When 24-year-old Ottawa forward Jean-Gabriel Pageau tipped a shoot past New York goalkeeper Henrik Lundqvist with good 62 seconds left in regulation in a playoff game final calendar month, Senators fans at canadian Tire Center were just overjoyed that the score was tied. But when Pageau was credited with the goal over the public-address system, several fans made certain to follow field hockey custom and throw their caps and hats on the ice. It was Pageau ’ s third goal of the bet on – the individual accomplishment known normally as a hat whoremaster. It seems as if hat tricks, and hat-trick celebrations, have been around ice field hockey a long as there has been a Stanley Cup, which dates to 1892 and was awarded for the first time a class late to the Montreal Hockey Club for being the top amateur ice hockey club in Canada.

But the beginning three-goal game regarded as a hat flim-flam, at least as recognized by historians at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, only occurred on 26 January 1946, after Chicago forward Alex Kaleta scored four goals in a 6-5 loss to Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens. There had been early person feats called hat tricks in other sports for closely 100 years before Kaleta walked into Sammy Taft ’ s celebrated hat shop on Spadina Avenue in Toronto and told the gregarious taft that he wanted to buy a fedora – but could not afford one. Legend has it that Taft, always looking for a direction to promote his hat workshop, told Kaleta that he would give him a hat if he scored three goals that night against the Maple Leafs. Taft had heard the three-goal game referred to as a “ hat magic trick ” on the radio, so he was inspired. But the term, angstrom best as anyone can determine, originated all the way back in 1855, when a 25-year-old professional English cricketer, Heathfield Harman ( HH ) Stevenson, took wickets on three straight balls for All-England against Hallam at Hyde Park in Sheffield. At the time, custom called for a collection to be taken among spectators for an outstanding performance, and Stevenson was presented with a hat purchased from the proceeds, according to no less than the Oxford English Dictionary. The Cricket Archive told the Guardian that the earliest habit of the term that could be found in newspaper archives was in the Luton Times and Advertiser of 3 July 1855, which reported from a 24 June match between St John ’ s College and St Alban ’ s Grammar School. “ The Grammar School were dismissed in a quarter of an hour for alone 6 runs, chiefly by the bowling of the brothers Beldam, G.W. Beldham doing the ‘ hat trick ’ and taking 5 wickets at the cost of 1 run, C.A. Beldham taking 5 wickets for 5 runs, ” the newspaper reported. The term, known in England as a “ hat-trick, ” became part of the parlance of association football, or soccer, later in the nineteenth century. John McDougall, playing for Scotland, was the first to record a “ hat-trick ” in external rival when he scored goals in the one-seventh, 41st and 50th minutes in a 7-2 victory over England earlier 10,000 in Glasgow on 2 March 1878. Hat tricks popped up in other sports and games for accomplishments in threes : in lacrosse, urine polo and team handball for three goals in a game, but besides in darts for three consecutive bullseyes, and in marbles for hitting all marbles in a single turn.

But the term was taken to another, and much rowdier, charge by field hockey fans, who hurl their own hats onto the ice to salute a player – about always but not entirely from the home team – after he has scored his third goal of a game. ( Fans in Ottawa besides tossed hats onto the methamphetamine last October when Auston Matthews, a 19-year-old forward for Toronto, scored his third gear of four goals in his first NHL game. ) A couple of years after Sammy Taft handed Kaleta his hat, a Montreal clothier named Henri Henri started doing the lapp for any musician who scored three goals in a game at the Montreal Forum. The Guelph Brantford Mad Hatters, an Ontario Hockey League affiliate of the Rangers, handed out Brantford hats to a player who scored three goals in a game. It is indecipherable when fans started throwing hats onto the ice to punctuate a hat trick, but Liam Maguire, an Ottawa-based NHL generator and historian, told the Guardian that the tradition started around the time hatters stopped awarding fedoras to players who got hat tricks, most likely in Toronto or Montreal. After play is stopped so dozens of caps can be collected, they are either turned over to jacob’s ladder – the newer ones, anyhow – or the musician who notched the hat trick. ( Alex Ovechkin of Washington is said to be fond of looking through the down of caps after his hat tricks and picking out one or two nice ones ). At Columbus, the caps from a hat trick have been thrown into a large bank identification number at the team ’ s arena that looks like a little field hockey rink. Often, teams offer hood discounts at their stadium team stores on hat-trick nights so fans can buy new caps to wear to the adjacent crippled. The rehearse has carried over to baseball. not surprisingly, fans at Toronto Blue Jays games have thrown caps onto the field when a home musician smashes three home runs in a game. But Major League Soccer officials say soccer hat tricks don ’ t lawsuit showers of hats. There are “ natural hat tricks ” – when a player scores three goals in a quarrel – and “ Gordie Howe hat tricks, ” when a musician scores a finish, assists on another and gets a fight major penalty in a game, though the legendary Howe himself was said to do that only twice.

Hat-trick hat-throwing has even carried over to early continents. During a November 2014 Kontinental Hockey League game in Siberia, three fans and a team employee were arrested for “ disrupting the peace in public places ” after a hat-trick hat-throwing. The local anesthetic patrol were obviously unaware of the custom. At the Canadian Tire Center in Ottawa, the Senators actually keep the hats for two weeks at guest services and offer them back to the fans who threw them, deoxyadenosine monophosphate retentive as they can properly identify them. But the big hat that Sammy Taft gave Alex Kaleta was apparently lost somewhere along the way. Think how many loonies that would fetch now .