Mystery of Yellowknife’s vanished Snowking Cup is solved

The Snowking Cup is back. Sure, it looked like it could use a vacation and some major surgery, but what you’re witnessing is a mystery solved.

Last week, we appealed for your help locating the cup.

Mike Mitchell, leading the search, said he had asked multiple organizers of Yellowknife’s annual pond hockey extravaganza but couldn’t figure out when it went missing or where it might be.

He was motivated to find the trophy because, as a Snowking Cup veteran who had never lifted the cup himself, he wanted his son to have the chance after the boy’s team – the stupefyingly named How Bats Pee – won this year’s event. No trophy was presented after the final because it could not be found.

A week later, the cup is back.

Mitchell told us he was contacted by a member of a former winning team who confessed they had broken the cup.

That person, whom Mitchell referred to as an “anonymous bungler,” commissioned a replacement of the trophy after breaking it but, Mitchell wrote, “the replacement broke, too.”

After we published last week’s appeal, the battered remnants of the replacement trophy showed up during the weekend’s Balsillie Cup old timers’ hockey tournament in Yellowknife, allowing the Mitchells their long-awaited photo with it.

After that, Mitchell said, Snowking himself – for whom the Snowking Cup and Snowkings’ Winter Festival are named – “took an interest in the story and suggested making a new base.”

Mitchell did so and the trophy, which had been listing wildly on its old base, now sits atop a sturdier wooden structure.

What Mitchell calls a “pop can plaque” is affixed to the wooden base, bearing the name How Bats Pee to commemorate this year’s winners.

Now that the trophy is back, Mitchell told us it is “heading to Snowking World Headquarters for safe keeping until next year’s likely snafu.”

You can expect another public appeal in about 11 months’ time.