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Nearly 40 years after excavators stumbled upon a treasure trove of long-lost films buried in the Yukon permafrost, the collection has just yielded its latest secret: Extremely rare footage of the infamous 1919 World Series.

Known to baseball historians as the sport’s “darkest hour” — and immortalized in such movies as Field of Dreams and Eight Men Out — the series saw eight Chicago White Sox players, including the the legendary “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, accused of conspiring with gamblers to intentionally lose to the Cincinnati Reds in the so-called Black Sox scandal.

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That missed double play was one of the first public indications that the World Series was being thrown by the White Sox

“I knew nobody had really looked at these prints before,” said Bill Morrison, the New York City-based filmmaker who came across the footage at Library and Archives Canada. “When I got to it, I was relatively certain I had a historical find.”

Although the film depicts one of the most signature moments in American sports, it has nevertheless spent the last four decades hiding in plain sight at a Gatineau, Que.-based preservation centre operated by Library and Archives Canada.