Long before the Wild and North Stars staked claim to the being the best hockey teams in Minnesota and even prior to the National Hockey League’s rise to prominence, it was the St. Paul Athletic Club Hockey Team that skated into the hearts of fans in the state and into the national record books.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the 1916 winning of the MacNaughton Cup by the St. Paul Athletic Club team, considered by some historians of the game as instrumental to the future success and popularity of the sport and the emergence of Minnesota as the “State of Hockey.”

Led by White Bear Lake-raised Frank “Moose” Goheen (just the second player from the U.S. elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, after Hobey Baker), the St. Paul Athletic Club team won the Cup, awarded to the champion of the American Amateur Hockey Association, a senior league located in the Upper Midwest. Hockey fans today know the MacNaughton Cup as the trophy given to the regular season champions of the WCHA, but back then, it was the prize for what was the highest level of hockey in the country.

A mural on the walls of the Xcel Energy Center commemorates the St. Paul Athletic Club team’s accomplishments, one of several displays around the arena managed by Minnesota Wild team curator Roger Godin.

Godin, author of the 2005 book, Before the Stars: Early Major League Hockey and the St. Paul Athletic Club Team, and the first director of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, considers the “ACs” (as he calls them in his book) to be among the pioneers of the game in the United States.

“I think it’s very significant, because, keep in mind, we didn’t have professional hockey at this point in time. This was the highest level of hockey in the United States,” Godin told FOX Sports North in a recent interview. In the preface of Before the Stars, Godin writes, “the State of Hockey began with these men.”