[1] The Shamrock Lacrosse Club of Montreal predated the hockey team by twenty years, founded in 1867 by J.

The newly revived Montreal Shamrocks hockey club then replaced the Crystals midway through the AHAC's 1895 season.

Following the retirement of its stars, including Hall of Famers Harry Trihey and Arthur Farrell, the Shamrocks faded from prominence and never again had a winning season.

While the lacrosse club was a predominantly working-class team, based largely in the Irish Catholic industrial working-class neighbourhood of Griffintown, the hockey club reflected a more bourgeois background, more in keeping with the image the Shamrock Amateur Athletic Association wished to convey to the wider community of Montreal, as Irish Catholics attempted to integrate into the mainstream of the city's body politic in the late 19th century.

Many of the players on the Stanley Cup–winning teams of 1899–1901 went on to study at McGill University, and entered into the city's bourgeois professional ranks as doctors, lawyers, and businessmen.

Harry Trihey, the captain of the Cup-winning teams, became a prominent Montreal lawyer and, during World War I, was commissioned by the Government of Canada to raise the Irish Canadian Rangers, a venture that ended with Mr. Trihey resigning his commission and returning to Montreal in 1916 after the British High Command reversed its earlier promise to Mr. Trihey to send the Rangers into battle as a unit, deciding instead to plug them into the front line as reinforcements.

Mr. Trihey also had problems recruiting in Quebec and Ireland following the GPO Rising in Dublin at Easter 1916.