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the OHA senior final be played at the Mutual Street rink on February 28.
    For the Ottawa Hockey Club, this was the final outrage. Now the reigning Ontario champions for three seasons, it believed it had earned the right to host the final. Going to Toronto would not only mean additional travel expense, but a higher risk that the ice would be poor at season’s end. Before their semifinal against Queen’s University, the Ottawas pulled out of the competition. Even in Kingston, public opinion was on their side.
    Osgoode Hall Law School produced Toronto’s first provincial senior champion. Yet, despite winning the OHA title twice, the Osgoodes never did get a shot at the Stanley Cup.
    The Ottawa–OHA spat got ugly. After Osgoode defeated Queen’s on slushy ice to win the championship, the Ottawas refused to return the OHA’s Cosby Cup. They claimed that, as three-time winners, they were taking permanent possession of the trophy—a common sports tradition of the era. Only after Major A. Morgan Cosby himself refuted that interpretation—and the Ottawa club received lawyer’s letters—did the former champs relent.
    The motives of the OHA in this dispute remain unclear. Perhaps Toronto interests did not want a far superior and far-off club. Perhaps theywere tired of scheduling around Ottawa’s dual membership in the OHA and AHAC. In any case, Ottawa was gone from the Ontario league forever. Henceforth they would play exclusively in the Quebec association.
    Of course, by 1894 the OHA championship was no longer the highest prize to which an Ontario team could aspire. The “Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup from Stanley of Preston,” almost immediately known as the Stanley Cup, now embodied national supremacy, as far as Canadian hockey fans were concerned. And the Toronto Osgoodes wanted their shot. This time, however, a scheduling controversy would work against the provincial capital.
    The Cup trustees, P. D. Ross and Sheriff John Sweetland, both of Ottawa, had decided that the league holding the trophy would first settle its own title and then accept challenges. Unfortunately, the AHAC regular season that year resulted in a four-way tie, which led to protracted negotiations between the clubs, followed by a lengthy period of playoffs. Accommodating the OHA was the least of the AHAC’s concerns.
    The defending champion Montreal Wheelers were eventually victorious. But by the time they clinched, on March 22, the chances of playable ice for a Cup final, even in Montreal, were remote. Osgoode Hall, now out of practice, let its challenge to the MAAA quietly pass.
    The Toronto Osgoodes remained a serious OHA contender for the next several years. After the departure of the Ottawa Hockey Club, however, the next OHA dynasty fell to Queen’s University. The Kingston club won the senior title in four of the next five years. The one exception was 1897–98, when the “Legalites” again beat Queen’s to take the title. For whatever reason, Osgoode made no attempt to challenge for the Dominion championship and quietly vanished from the Stanley Cup scene.

    The year of the Toronto Osgoodes’ second senior title coincided with a big battle over the second of the OHA’s recurring themes of controversy: the definition of an “amateur.” When the founders of the OHA spoke of “clean” hockey, they meant far more than an absence of rough play; they also had in mind a moral philosophy of athletics. That philosophy was“amateurism”—and the term then meant much more than not paying athletes.
    Amateurism embraced the belief that sport for its own sake, not for money, was the root of all virtue in athletics. Indeed, professionalism in athletics was believed to be the source of all vice. Without money, sport was regarded as a noble calling in which the young man nurtured heroic qualities—endurance, courage, self-sacrifice for the team—all to