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Canadians love to argue about who invented hockey. Windsor, Nova Scotia claims that its residents played a crude game of shinny as early as 1844. Halifax contends that garrisoned soldiers invented the game, calling it “ice polo,” and Montreal lays claim to the first organized indoor game of hockey in 1875.

While the game’s invention is contested, Kingston is the undisputed home of the game’s longest rivalry: the annual contest between Queen’s and its cross-town rival, the Royal Military College.

In the 1880s, rugby football was a popular pastime at Queen’s College, but students were remiss to find an activity for the winter months when the ground was frozen. Garrison soldiers, many of whom had served in Montreal and the Maritimes, and cadets at RMC spent their winter afternoons on Kingston’s frozen harbour playing shinny. In 1886, a group of Queen’s students challenged them to a formal game, and on March 10, the teams took to the ice. Queen’s was decked out in striped tricolour jerseys and the military in the livery of the Canadian Horse Artillery.

The 1886 game was played in the shadow of the Martello tower on Kingston’s frozen harbour:

• There were no markings on the ice.
• Players’ sticks were only one metre long.
• The “puck” was in fact a whittled-down lacrosse ball, shaved into a hexagonal shape that gave it a quirky bounce.
• Goalies were not permitted to splay themselves on the ice.
• White-coated referees stood behind the crude goal posts to validate scoring.

But there wasn’t much scoring that day. Queen’s would win 1-0 only after fourth-year student Lennox Irving deked his opponents by skating around a band shell that had been placed at the centre of the “rink” and scoring on the undefended military goalie.

The next year, RMC exacted revenge with a 4-1 victory.

The Queen’s-RMC rivalry is continued each year in the Carr-Harris Cup, a game where the Gaels and Paladins go head-to-head.

A speeding skater – “Lennie” – atop the trophy commemorates Lennox Irving, who after Queen’s went on to a distinguished military and legal career in the Ottawa Valley.