This post is part of our series on hockey's strange side: the ghosts, curses, and rituals that make the game feel like more than a sport. The series was inspired by the book The Hockey Gods Are Real; the stories here are our own research.
Some hockey stories don't need embellishment to give you chills. This one has a Stanley Cup, a missing plane, an 11-year drought, and an ending that hockey fans in Toronto still talk about as if the Hockey Gods wrote it themselves.
The Goal
The 1951 Stanley Cup Final between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens was one of the tightest ever played. Every game in the series went to overtime, something that had never happened before and hasn't happened since. On April 21, 1951, with Toronto one win away from the Cup, the fifth game went to overtime too.
That's when Bill Barilko, a 24-year-old defenceman from Timmins, Ontario, did something defencemen weren't supposed to do: he gambled. He pinched in from the blue line, threw himself at a loose puck, and backhanded it past Canadiens goalie Gerry McNeil as he fell. The Leafs were Stanley Cup champions, and the photo of Barilko flying through the air became one of the most famous images in hockey.
The Disappearance
That summer, Barilko went on a fishing trip in northern Quebec with his dentist, Henry Hudson, who flew his own small float plane. On the way home, in late August 1951, the plane disappeared. Search crews covered huge stretches of northern Ontario and Quebec and found nothing. Bill Barilko, the hero of the spring, was simply gone.
The Drought
Barilko's goal gave the Leafs their fourth Stanley Cup in five seasons. After he disappeared, they didn't win another for 11 years. A team that had owned the late 1940s suddenly couldn't find its way back. Fans started to wonder whether the Leafs would ever win again while Barilko was still out there somewhere in the northern bush.
The Ending
On April 22, 1962, the Leafs finally beat the Chicago Black Hawks to win the Stanley Cup, their first since Barilko's goal. About six weeks later, on June 6, 1962, a helicopter pilot spotted the wreckage of a small plane in the woods north of Cochrane, Ontario, well off its planned route. It was Barilko's.
The order of events is usually told the other way around in the retelling: the plane is found, and then the curse lifts. In reality the Cup came first, by a matter of weeks. Either way, it's hard to blame Leafs fans for feeling that something was settled that year. The Leafs later retired Barilko's No. 5, and the Tragically Hip told his story in the song "Fifty Mission Cap," on their 1992 album Fully Completely, introducing him to a whole new generation of fans.
Ghost Story or Coincidence?
There's no ghost in the official record, of course. Teams go through dry spells, and the Leafs of the 1950s had real problems on the ice. But hockey has never been a sport that settles for the official record. A young hero who scores the biggest goal of his life, disappears, and is found only after his team finally wins again? If the Hockey Gods are real, this is exactly the kind of story they'd tell.
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