The topic comes up every few months: Edward Stanley, a second-year economics and management student at England’s Oxford University, will make the acquaintance of a hockey fan, almost invariably a Canadian. And when the hockey fan learns of Edward’s surname, there will be questions.

“The conversation might go, ‘Have you ever had any family out in Canada? Because there’s a cup over there called the Stanley Cup. Is there any connection?’” Stanley was saying over the phone from Oxford recently. “And I tend to say, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact there is.’”

Trade messages via email or text and he signs off as Ed, an affable, humble lad who’ll happily share tales of his rugby-playing, essay-writing young adulthood. Refer to him by his title of British nobility and he is, by inheritance, Lord Stanley. Age 19, he’s the great-great-great-grandson of hockey’s beloved Lord Stanley of Preston, the sixth governor general of Canada, who gave the game its greatest prize back in 1892.

“I love talking about (the Stanley Cup) because it’s an incredible piece of history to be a part of,” Stanley said.

It’s been a bigger-than-usual year for Lord Stanley’s vaunted chalice. The 125th anniversary of its gifting has been celebrated with a series of tributes, including the October unveiling of a stunning public-art monument to the cup on Ottawa’s Sparks St., a rendering the current Lord Stanley, who’s seen pictures online, lauded as “a fun, contemporary take on the design.” Not that he claims domain over such things. His title, he points out, is not a signifier of authority, only a vestige of a decidedly less contemporary society.

“The title of Lord Stanley in modern day means very little,” Stanley said. “But to me it’s a reminder of some amazing things that my ancestors have done. And it’s a driver for me, to make them proud and try to strive and get close to what they’ve done.”

His lordship doesn’t sit in Britain’s House of Lords, the unelected chamber of parliament in which his family once held a seat by hereditary right. Which is not to say the Stanleys lack influence. They count among their longtime family friends the British Royal Family; Stanley is a godson to Prince Andrew and once served as a page to the Queen. Stanley’s father is an investment banker and the current president of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce.

As familial legacies go, Stanley figures his connection to one of the most iconic sporting trophies on the planet beats plenty of alternatives.

“Unlike a lot of achievements of the great figures of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, the giving of the Stanley Cup has had no negative effects,” Stanley said. “Great leaders winning wars have often caused despair among many. But the Stanley Cup has only brought joy to a lot of people.”

Joy to a lot of people — minus the folks whose teams almost never win the thing. Still, one can’t blame a Brit for not yet being intimately acquainted with the tortured existences of Cup-starved communities. Stanley has, in case you’re wondering, never seen an NHL game — an experience he’s saving for a live-action opportunity when he eventually ventures to this side of the Atlantic. The only hockey he’s seen in the flesh was played by friends on Oxford’s club team.

“I’ve watched clips (of the NHL). But slightly embarrassed that I’ve not been able to watch a game in full,” Stanley said. “But I’d love to go out and watch it in person, in Canada, when I do it for the first time, rather than having a cheap man’s TV session.”

What he has seen, he says, he’s enjoyed. He figures it looks “definitely more difficult than field hockey,” which he’s tried, and nearly as perilous as his preferred full-contact game.

“Ice hockey looks like a very violent sport, which I quite enjoy being a rugby player myself,” he said, reeling off a laundry list of injuries that have, over his years at Oxford and elite boarding school Eton College, chronically limited his match readiness. “I’ve had a lot of hematomas and broken thumbs. I’ve had a number of injuries to my neck and shoulder, ligaments and knees … I’m technically still vice-captain of my college rugby team, but I put my shoulder out again just after being appointed, so I haven’t managed to play yet.”

His other game is the ponies — another sport in which his family name is elemental. Stanley is the first-born son of Teddy Stanley, the 19th Earl of Derby (pronounced DAR-bee). It was a nearly a quarter of a millennium ago that the 12th Earl of Derby gave his name to the Epsom Derby, the most prestigious horse race in Britain, and the one that inspired the folks in Kentucky as they searched for the name for what became the first jewel of the U.S. Triple Crown.

But while the family gave title to the Epsom Derby, it hasn’t been synonymous with winning the race — and not for lack of trying. The Stanleys have been breeding and racing horses for generations, always with an eye toward big prizes. Edward Stanley grew up understanding that a family-bred horse hadn’t won the race at Epsom since 1933 — until, that is, 2014. That’s when Australia, a three-year-old chestnut colt bred by the family, came down the stretch with the lead. To put this situation in hockey terms, this was the Maple Leafs nursing a one-goal lead in the final minutes of Game 7 of a Stanley Cup final. Only instead of Toronto aiming to vanquish a half-century-plus championship drought, Australia was attempting to end a family’s 81-year absence from a particular winner’s circle.

“I was extremely nervous. My head spent most of the time in the hat, not wanting to speak to anyone,” Stanley said.

Australia, as it turns out, held on to win.

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“I just remember as (Australia) came down the home straight, my dad bursting into tears,” Stanley said. “You could see how much it meant to have bred a horse 230-some years on from his ancestors starting the race.”

Perhaps the victory meant enough that it took some of the sting out of the fact the family sold away Australia two years earlier for about $850,000. Thoroughbred racing, for Edward Stanley, is now only a passionate hobby, although he said he’d be “open” to one day making it a career, as more than one Stanley — including his uncle, Peter, who runs the family breeding operation — has done before him.

Growing up Stanley, he said, has meant gradually educating himself on an ancient web of blood relatives, along with various particulars of each one’s long-ago life.

“A lot (of family history) comes up discussing pictures and paintings around the house … ‘Why is his picture hanging above your head where you eat?’ ” he said.

Stanley said he first learned about the forebear who donated the Stanley Cup on trips to the family’s log cabin. Known as Potato Pie House, it’s set in a woodlot outside Liverpool. Around the time Lord Stanley of Preston gave Canada the gift of a now-iconic silver bowl — an event that coincided with the nobleman’s imminent return to Britain — the people of Canada shipped over the cabin as a going-away present.

Why is it called Potato Pie House?

“I’m not sure to be honest,” Stanley said in an email. “But I would assume it would be a retreat in the woods where you might go and have a potato pie at a picnic. … We use it regularly.”

The family’s preferred fare when they convene at the log cabin imported from Canada? Sausage rolls.

The holiday season brings with it another family tradition that’s vaguely new world. It’s around this time every year when Stanley, like many Britons, laces up a pair of skates and goes for an annual wobble around a rink. This is where it becomes clear that hockey, although it’s prominent in the family story arc, isn’t necessarily coursing through the Stanley bloodstream.

“I generally pull myself ’round on the banister at the edge, and then get a little bit of confidence after 10 metres, and separate myself from the banister,” Edward said with a chuckle. “And then I usually just collapse onto the ice. I’m one of the worst skaters you’ll ever come across.”

From old Lord Stanley of Preston to the current Lord Stanley, bravely eschewing skating lessons, an ice-bound legacy lives on.