It’s been around for over a century, the oldest team award in North American professional sports. Donated by and named for Sir Arthur Frederick Stanley, governor general of Canada from 1888 to 1893, fan of the game and hockey father, it set the distinguished gentleman back 50 guineas, close to fifty 1893 dollars, when he ordered it from a London silversmith.

The Montreal Athletic Association claimed the first Stanley Cup victory in 1893, beginning an era when the trophy was subject to challenge from anyone figuring he had a good enough team to triumph over the incumbent titleholder. Towns of all sizes laid claim to the crown.

The Dawson Nuggets traveled over 3000 miles from the Yukon to take on the Ottawa Silver Seven, a team described as the game’s first dynasty. The trek, made by foot, bicycle, dogsled, boat and finally by transcontinental railroad, ended in a two-game sound drubbing of the visitors, with Frank McGee picking up 14 goals in the second match.

The Kenora Thistles, hailing from an Ontario frontier town, home to a mere 4000 souls, captured it in 1907, the smallest center to ever claim the Cup. As the professional game came to the forefront, the Stanley Cup turned pro as well, initially as an annual match-up between eastern and western champions. The Seattle Metropolitans became the first American team to win the Cup when they defeated the Montreal Canadiens in the spring of 1917.

By 1927, the Stanley Cup became the exclusive property of the NHL, by then the undisputed top hockey circuit in existence. Lord Stanley’s Cup’s form has changed through the past century, though. Originally a punch bowl, it began growing as teams added the names of players to the surface. Begun in 1908 by the Montreal Wanderers, who inscribed their names on the inside of the bowl, it became standard practice for winning players to have their names so memorialized.

Almost 2400 people have had their names inscribed on the only team trophy that immortalizes the individuals who made up the championship squads. Both players and other significant contributors are mentioned on the Stanley Cup. Among players, Montreal Canadiens alumni are the men most frequently listed. Henri Richard has the most with eleven. Jean Beliveau and Yvan Cournoyer are each there ten times. Red Kelly, who won eight titles with Detroit and Toronto, has the most Stanley Cup victories among the men who never suited up for the Habs.

Marguerite Norris, president of the Red Wings in the 1950s was the first woman to have her name inscribed on the Stanley Cup. Ten other women have followed suit since, four of them named Ilitch.

In the summer of 1925, the Patrick boys, Muzz and Lynn, tumbled across the silverware in their basement, where their father, Lester, coach of the Victoria Cougars had put it after his team won it that spring. Using a nail, they scratched their names into the silver surface, something that would be done in an official capacity some fifteen years later when both played for the 1939-40 New York Rangers.

For reasons unknown, the Stanley Cup contains more than a few spelling errors, mistakes that have been intentionally repeated as subsequent Stanley Cups were commissioned. Gaye Stewart, Cy Denneny, Alex Delvecchio, Pete Palangio, Bob Gainey and Adam Deadmarsh are only a few of the players who have had their names erroneously inscribed, but one of the immortals of the game falls victim to the most creative multiple misspellings of all time.

Jacques Plante won six Stanley Cups with the Canadiens, five of them in a row, from 1956 through 1960. Inexplicably, particularly since the engraving on the Stanley Cup has always been confided to a Montreal silversmith, in a town where he was a household name, it is misspelled five different ways and appears only once as it did on his birth certificate.

Some years it seemed to be too much trouble to open up a newspaper and check the sports pages. The 1962-63 TORONTO MAPLE LEAES, the 1964-65 MONTREAL CANADIENE and the 1980-81 NEW YORK ILANDERS are all teams of legend it appears. Not to mention the 1971-72 BQSTQN BRUINS, who won it all on a Bqbby Qrr goal.

As years passed, the number of people listed on the Cup increased. A generation ago, 25 or 30 names completed the honors, but the number has regularly topped the 40-name mark in recent years, peaking with an all-time high of 55 men and women singled out by the 1997-98 Detroit Red Wings.

Only once has a name been removed from the Stanley Cup. After it became apparent that he had nothing to do with Edmonton’s triumphant 1983-84 campaign, Bazil Pocklington, father of the Oilers owner, had his name crossed off the silverware, overwritten with XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX. Kerry Day, son of Leafs coach, Hap Day has managed to avoid the same fate and is still immortalized for his distinguished service as team mascot in the late 1940s.

Most centenarians have had a few close calls in their long lives. The Stanley Cup is no exception. Hockey players, particularly when in a celebratory mood, can be forgetful. The 1905 Ottawa Silver Seven, well oiled at the time, decided to see whether their hard-won silver bowl could be kicked over the Rideau Canal. It couldn’t, landing in the middle. The team continued their festivities, returning the following day to retrieve the trophy, a relatively easy task on the waterway’s still-frozen surface.

The 1908 Montreal Wanderers had a photograph taken with the Cup but forgot the centrepiece of the composition at the photographer’s studio. When it was finally tracked down, it was doing duty as a geranium planter.

The 1924 Montreal Canadiens entrusted Sprague Cleghorn with the task of transporting the Stanley Cup to owner Leo Dandurand’s victory party. Temporarily sidelined by a flat tire, Cleghorn placed the Cup on the side of the road, changed the tire and resumed his journey. Returning shortly afterwards he found it where he had left it.

The 1943-44 Habs celebrated their triumph in a Chinese restaurant. It had been 13 years since the last Stanley Cup victory bash and this one went well into the evening and the boys drifted home to prepare for their upcoming hangovers, nobody thinking to take the vessel that held exactly 14 bottles of beer with them.

In the days before it was assigned around the clock security, the Stanley Cup, like most celebrities, was a target for malfeasance, the target of three kidnap attempts. In 1962, a fan removed it from a trophy case at the Chicago Stadium and headed towards and exit before being apprehended. In 1977, the most revered award in the hockey world was unceremoniously dumped into a duffel bag while on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame. The thieves were stopped just short of their objective as they made for their getaway car.

They thought the Cup was a goner when it disappeared without a trace following the 1979 parade in Montreal. Abducted and bundled off under the cover of darkness in a speeding automobile, it reappeared on a front lawn in Thurso, Quebec, early the next morning. Friends and neighbors of the Lafleur family were thrilled that Guy had brought his work home with him. League trustees were not amused.

Things have changed since Guy Lafleur took matters into his own hands and players from winning teams are now allowed one day with the Stanley Cup, to do pretty much anything they wish. Adventures and misadventures have multiplied in recent years as the most elegant trophy in the sports world has spent the recent past living up to the classic country song, “I’ve Been Everywhere.”