And that tradition, which is going strong in his current capacity as Chief Operating Officer for the Kitchener Rangers, began when he was a young boy growing up in Oshawa.

Bienkowski looks back fondly on those days, when as a goalie for the Oshawa Minor Generals, he recalls winning championships "pretty well every year."

Now, as the man most responsible for keeping the Rangers successful off the ice, Bienkowski is hoping to see a dream season on the ice end with the biggest championship of them all in junior hockey: a Memorial Cup.

The host Rangers open the tournament tonight against Gatineau and hope to close it out with a victory in the final May 25.

If they do, it would end a season that Bienkowski calls even more gratifying than their last Memorial Cup win, in 2003.

"I'm real proud to be honest," Bienkowski says of a season that began with the Memorial Cup bid victory and saw them win a fourth OHL championship this week. "When we did the bid, there was some back-door criticism... some people questioning the ability of our team, but I think what we did in that bid process is show that we have an organization and a team that was competitive year in and year out."

Indeed, the Rangers are considered by many to be the model franchise in the Ontario Hockey League, routinely finishing above .500 and making six trips to the Memorial Cup since the 1980s, winning two so far.

But, a community-owned team since their inception in 1963, the Rangers struggled to make ends meet financially in the mid-1990s, when Bienkowski, a chartered accountant, joined as a volunteer director and soon became president.

In 2002, he stepped down as a volunteer and left his job in Toronto to assume the newly-created role of COO for the Rangers, where he has flourished along with the team.

"To have a job where you have a passion for the sport and you've been involved with the team right from a player to an executive, it's been great," says Bienkowski, who was drafted by the Oshawa Generals, but traded to the Rangers and won an OHL championship there in 1981. "It's a fun job and not many people can say they have a fun job."