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Montreal Canadiens vs. Calgary Flames 1985-86

The Stanley Cup is one of the most-recognized symbols in North American sports. It is the championship trophy of the NHL, National Hockey League which is won by one of the teams that have qualified for the championship finals after playing a series of playoff matches. It is the only trophy in professional sports that has the name of the winning players, coaches, management, and club staff engraved upon it. The Cup winners keep it until the new champion is crowned.

The 1985 to 1986 season Stanley Cup final match was played between the most rival teams of the Montreal Canadiens and the Calgary Flames. Both the teams had sustained the best winning forms in that season and kept the desire to win the title at the Stanley Cup. However, the Montreal Canadiens team proved to be more dominating and compiled the most famous and memorable victory over the Calgary Flames team.

The Calgary team may go down in history as hockey's comparable of Leon Spinks, who came out of nowhere to win the heavyweight boxing championship. This was a year the Edmonton Oilers should have won a third straight National Hockey League title. Instead, the Montreal Canadiens, with eight rookies on the ice and one coaching, gained their 23rd NHL championship that put them one ahead of baseball's New York Yankees for the most titles in major league team sports.

The Canadiens just as Spinks was rough on the edges when he surprised Muhammad Ali and won the heavyweight title in 1978. But Les Habitants got the job done in defeating the Calgary Flames, four games to one, in the championship series. For Calgary, long shots like the Canadiens going into postseason play, losing in the final series was a heartbreaker. The Flames had surprised Edmonton in the first round of the playoffs and then downed the St. Louis Blues in a seven game Campbell Conference championship series.

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