According to Craig Bowlsby, the Vancouver-based author of “Empire of Ice: The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, 1911–1926,” Seattle’s was a textbook expansion team.

“The spectacle of professional hockey landed fully formed onto the artificial ice, all out of proportion to the existing pond-hockey tradition,” he wrote in 2013 for The Seattle Times. “The Mets represented the best hockey in the world in an American city new to it, and their training, skill and ice rink were state of the art.”

Image A Seattle Metropolitans sweater. Credit... Dave Sandford/Hockey Hall of Fame

In those days, the champions of the N.H.A. and P.C.H.A. played for the Stanley Cup. In 1917, their second season, the Metropolitans won the P.C.H.A. and played a best-of-five series in Seattle against the N.H.A.-champion Montreal Canadiens, who in net had Georges Vezina (yes, the player whose name is now on the trophy given to the N.H.L.’s best goalie every season).

The hosts lost the first game 8-4, but swept the next three at the sold-out Ice Arena, capped with a 9-1 disassembly of the defending Stanley Cup champions, who had been so confident of a series win that they did not bother to bring the trophy to Washington State.

Seattle earned a rematch with the Canadiens two years later, but the series ended tied at 2-2 because of an influenza epidemic, in which a Canadiens player died.

Seattle lost its last Stanley Cup series to the Ottawa Senators in 1920 and folded in 1924 when the Ice Arena was sold and converted to a parking garage, partly for guests of the new Olympic Hotel.