Sports Americana Time Capsule | November 5, 1955
Imagine watching a hockey game where one player scores three goals in 44 seconds. Now imagine that those three goals are so extraordinary that they help change the rules of the sport.
That is exactly what happened on November 5, 1955, at the Montreal Forum.
The Montreal Canadiens were hosting the Boston Bruins, and things weren’t going particularly well. Boston had built a 2-0 lead, and the Canadiens needed something to get them back into the game.
Enter Jean Béliveau.
Early in the second period, with Boston’s Hal Laycoe serving a penalty, Béliveau went to work. At 42 seconds, he scored. At 1:08, he scored again. At 1:26, he completed the hat trick.
Three power-play goals. Forty-four seconds. One penalty.
And he wasn’t finished.
Béliveau added another goal later in the game, giving him all four Montreal goals in a 4-2 victory. Bert Olmstead assisted on each of the three power-play goals.
But here’s where the story gets even better.
Under the NHL rules at the time, a player serving a minor penalty had to remain in the penalty box for the entire two minutes, regardless of how many goals the opposing team scored.
In other words, the Canadiens could score once, twice, or three times, and Boston would remain shorthanded.
Béliveau’s remarkable performance became one of the defining examples behind a rule change for the 1956-57 season. The NHL began allowing a player serving a minor penalty to return to the ice once the opposing team scored a power-play goal.
Think about that for a second.
A player scores three goals in 44 seconds, and the NHL changes the rulebook.
Jean Béliveau would go on to become one of the greatest players in hockey history, winning 10 Stanley Cups as a player and cementing his place among the sport’s all-time legends.
But on this November night in 1955, he did something that went beyond winning a hockey game.
He helped change the way the game was played.
Some nights belong in the record books. Others belong in the rulebook. This one managed to do both.
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