The last time the Ottawa Senators contended for the Stanley Cup, Joseph Stalin was running things in the Soviet Union, Benito Mussolini was watching over Italian train timetables, and Adolph Hitler was a best-selling author. Johnny Weissmuller was still a record-setting swimmer, Hollywood loincloth and Tarzan roles still in his future, Gene Tunney had defeated Jack Dempsey for the heavyweight boxing crown, and Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer drew fans in record numbers to the cinemas where they marveled at the cutting edge technology that made “talkies” possible.

By 1927 the NHL, originally a four-team all-Canadian loop, had a total of ten teams with more south of the 49th parallel than north of it for the first time. In order to balance the bookkeeping, the New York Americans played in the Canadian division. The Senators, one of the founding four, played in a town where not too long ago, the Silver Seven held sway over the hockey world in the days when the Stanley Cup was still a challenge trophy. Playing in a hockey hotbed they became the first NHL dynasty, winning the Stanley Cup in 1920, 1922 and 1923, defeating western pretenders for the national crown in the days when amateurism reigned, at least in theory.

The demise of Frank and Lester Patrick’s West Coast Hockey League left no other league of a caliber high enough to challenge the NHL teams so the league inherited the Stanley Cup in time for the 1926-27 campaign and have kept it ever since as the symbol of professional hockey supremacy. Skilled players flooded in from the defunct league and found spots on rosters around the NHL but Ottawa chose not to jump into the free agent pool, preferring to retain their veteran lineup, for the most part made up of local products.

While rosters had expanded to a dozen men in the generation since the Silver Seven ruled the ice, it didn't mean that Ottawa’s talent had been diluted. Still a powerhouse, the team iced seven players who would later be enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame, Cy Denneny, King Clancy, Hooley Smith, Jack Adams, Alex Connell, Frank Nighbor and George Boucher.

Losing only ten of the 44 games on the 1926-27 calendar, Ottawa won their division and were awarded a bye for the first round of the playoffs. A well-balanced team, none of the Senators was high on the list of league scoring leaders. Denneny, one of the game's top snipers, potted 17 goals to lead the club in the regular season, finished eighth in the league and Clancy's ten assists earned him fifth spot.

The initial round in the Canadian division didn't involve any travel for the teams involved. Montreal's Canadiens defeated the team that shared The Forum with them, coming out on top of the two-game total goal series on the right side of a 2-1 tally, needing eight minutes of overtime to complete the task. The Habs were soundly drubbed by the Senators in the first game with Ottawa taking a four-goal lead into the second and final match, an almost insurmountable lead in what some historians refer to as the “Dead-Puck Era.” Cruising to a 1-1 tie in the second game, the Sens moved on to the final, meeting the Boston Bruins in the first NHL championship that automatically meant a Stanley Cup title.

The Bruins, a relatively new team, had joined the NHL only a couple years earlier and didn't have the depth that the Senators did. While they had a tough, mean blue line corps made up of Eddie Shore, Sprague Cleghorn, Lionel Hitchman and Billy Coutu, Boston's forwards were not the equal of what Ottawa could throw into the fray.

The first game of the best of five series ended in a scoreless tie. A period of overtime did nothing to resolve the issue and left the Boston ice unplayable, prompting NHL President Frank Calder to first declare that if neither team won three games, the Cup would be shared and later amend his decision to award the trophy to the side that had won the most games once the fourth match was over and done with.

Ottawa took the second game 3-1, with Denneny scoring the winning goal and the series moved north for the final two games. Playing to a packed house, the Senators and Bruins played to another draw in the third match, with each team scoring once in regulation time and neither managing to light the lamp in the extra frame.

The final game of the 1927 postseason went beyond rugged play and well into the dirty. Blood flowed abundantly and regularly, stick work was almost constant. At game’s end, Boston defenseman Billy Coutu was so incensed with the officials that he charged after them after the game, striking one and shoving the other to the ground, earning a lifetime suspension that was not lifted until he was too old to lace 'em up.

By the time things wound down, the Senators had prevailed. As had the second game, the last one finished 3-1 and once again Cy Denneny, who picked up four of the team's six goals in the series, had scored the winner. Goaltender Connell recorded two shutouts and allowed only four pucks to pass him in the six games he had played.

It was the last postseason appearance the Senators would make. The team fell into financial distress and was forced to sell its players over the next few years to make ends meet. The team finished dead last in 1930-31 and suspended operations. They returned after a one-year absence only to finish in the cellar again in both 1932-33 and 1933-34.

The 1934-35 season began with an NHL team called the St. Louis Eagles and none in Canada's capital. It would be almost 60 years before hockey at its highest level returned. Should the Senators manage to go all the way this spring, ending a somewhat interrupted 80-year drought, it will be Ottawa's 12th Stanley Cup title.