A hat trick is three goals scored by a single player in one game — one of hockey's most recognizable individual achievements, and one of the few moments that reliably gets an entire arena on its feet.
The term itself didn't start in hockey. It comes from cricket, where a bowler who took three wickets on three consecutive deliveries was traditionally presented with a hat by his club, as a mark of a rare, difficult feat. The phrase eventually spread beyond cricket into other sports as general shorthand for any "three in a row" achievement, and hockey adopted it fully.
Hockey then built its own physical ritual on top of the borrowed term: when a player scores a third goal, fans throw their hats onto the ice in celebration, a tradition strongly associated with Chicago Blackhawks crowds, though it happens in arenas across the league. Rink staff have to pause play briefly to clear the hats before the game can continue — a delay every home crowd is happy to cause.
Hockey also invented its own tongue-in-cheek variant that has nothing to do with the literal hat tradition: the Gordie Howe hat trick, meaning a goal, an assist, and a fight all in the same game. It's named for Gordie Howe, whose combination of elite skill and physical toughness made the phrase an obvious fit, even though Howe himself only actually recorded the exact combination a handful of times across his career. The name stuck anyway, as a nod to the all-around style he represented.
Two very different traditions — one borrowed from cricket, one invented purely for a legendary player's reputation — both living inside the same three-word phrase.