A good 75 years have gone by and still a Rangers mystery remains unsolved.
During the 1950 playoffs the under .500 Rangers upset Montreal in the semi-finals and then went up against first place Detroit for the Stanley Cup.
Despite being heavy underdogs, the Blueshirts extended the series to a seventh and final game at Detroit's Olympia Stadium.
The game was tied 3-3 after regulation time and then moved into sudden-death overtime. And that's where the mystery begins.
It has been asserted in endless hockey conversations that the Blueshirts could have won the game in the first overtime period when one of the Rangers fired the puck past Detroit goalie Harry Lumley; but the rubber hit the post bounced free without crossing the line.
To this day that particular Ranger near-hero never has been authentically identified. In fact three-quarters of a century after that game there's no newspaper story available that describes the near goal. Nor video.
The most likely possibility was Don (Bones) Raleigh who scored overtime winners in two previous games, yet Bones never was mentioned in dispatches.
Dunc Fisher was another name that's been bruited about as well as Edgar Laprade.
When The Maven visited Rangers defenseman Pat Egan for a TV interview about 20 years ago, Egan claimed that he was the shooter.
"It was a two-on-one break," Egan recalled, "and I took the shot and beat Lumley. It bounced off the left post and skidded along the goal line.
"I thought I could get the rebound but Lumley got to it first and poked it out of danger."
There's only one problem; there's no video of the game that I've seen that shows Lumley and Egan in the sequence Pat described.
Perhaps some memorabilia collector out there has film or photo evidence of the play. So far this much is certain; the puck didn't go in!
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