Today the Stanley Cup is one of the most recognized professional sports trophies in the world.  But when it was created in 1893, the Stanley Cup was just a challenge cup.  To be the holder of this Cup, a Canadian hockey team had to directly challenge the current holder to compete for it – requests that were often turned down.  The only other way to get the Cup was to be in the same League as the team that had it, compete against them for a season and be declared the League champion.

In November, 1909, when the Cup was just 16 years-old, millionaire businessman M.J. O'Brien, founder of the Town of Renfrew, and his son Ambrose decided they wanted to win the Stanley Cup.  With that decision, they changed Canadian Hockey forever. 

The O'Brien's had a hockey team, the Renfrew Creamery Kings, that were part of the Upper Ottawa Valley Hockey League, and they issued a Stanley Cup Challenge to the reigning team, the Montreal Wanderers.  According to the rules of the day, this was one of the two ways a team could win the Cup.

But the Wanderers turned down the challenge, and as they were part of the Eastern Canadian Hockey Association, a different League than the Renfrew Creamery Kings, it seemed the O'Brien's had no way to get the Cup in the hands of their team.

Not willing to give up easily, Ambrose O'Brien went to Ottawa for the annual meeting of the Eastern Canadian Hockey Association in November 1909 to ask to join the League.  But with hockey quickly becoming recognized as a profitable venture, Association members decided to limit membership to maximize profits.  So they dismantled the Association and then restructured to form the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA).  The newly formed CHA then rejected the Renfrew Creamery Kings and excluded them (and the Montreal Wanderers), from the new League.

Angry but hardly undaunted, the O'Brien's teamed up with an equally livid Jimmy Gardner, owner of the Montreal Wanderers, and set out to establish their own League.  Despite jeers from other hockey organizations and the press, the O'Brien's announced loudly and clearly that their League would be the one to watch.

By December 2 of 1909, the national Hockey Association (NHA) consisting of five teams was formed.  M.J. O'Brien financed four teams in the League:  the Renfrew Creamery Kings which became the Renfrew Millionaires, and Cobalt, Haileybury and Les Canadiens of Montreal.  The fifth team was the Montreal Wanderers.

After signing numerous well-known, and highly expensive players, and seeing the NHA grow to include the Cup-holding Ottawa Senators by the second season, the O'Brien's realized that their dream of winning the Cup was eluding them. High salaries and competing interests in the railroad forced M J. and Ambrose to close the two Renfrew franchises in 1912.  But the League they created didn't die or fade away, instead it thrived.

One of the O'Brien franchises was sold to Percy Quinn to become the Toronto Tecumsehs, a team that would become the Toronto Ontario's.  The Ontario's was then sold to Eddie Livingstone in 1915 who renamed them the Shamrocks.  Livingstone also owned the Toronto Blueshirts and had both teams in the National Hockey Association.

It was Livingstone who provided the catalyst for the forming of the National Hockey League.  Often described as antagonistic and ambitious, he was not a favourite of the other NHA team owners.  Although he did comply with the demands to amalgamate the two Toronto teams into one team (a team that would eventually become the Toronto Maple Leafs), the other owners decided it was time for Livingstone to go.

In November 1917, the NHA team owners secretly met at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal.  They decided to join together to form a new League made up solely of themselves, leaving Livingstone the only remaining owner of a team in the NHA.  The new League was based on the same rules, format and constitution of the NHA but had a new name – the National Hockey League.

The foundation and establishment of the National Hockey League, now part of our national culture, started with the dream of a father and son in Renfrew.  That accomplishment is recognized today in the Hockey Hall of Fame, where Ambrose O'Brien was inducted under the category of "builder" and in Renfrew itself, Birthplace of the NHL.