At the end of the play-offs, one team will walk away being the first to have won the inaugural Walter Cup championship trophy - but for the Professional Women's Hockey League, their inaugural season was already a victory.

By the time the buzzer rang at Montreal's Bell Centre, sports history had been made: a record 21,105 people had attended a professional women's ice hockey game.

The April game - between Montreal and Toronto - marked the crowning achievement of the six-team Professional Women's Hockey League's (PWHL) inaugural season.

The initial success of the league, which spans both the US and Canada, comes as interest in women's sports soars - and after previous attempts to establish a professional women's league sputtered and ultimately failed, due to low attendance and financial woes.

In total, nearly 393,000 fans attended the league's regular season games at venues in Boston, New York, Minnesota, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

"This season has been a series of firsts, with a number of records broken," Jayna Hefford, the league's senior VP of hockey operations, told the BBC. "We continue to be excited and surprised."

Ms Hefford, a Hall of Fame former professional player and five-time Olympian, credited the league's initial success, in part, to a dedicated and diverse fanbase that in many cases were often not previously exposed to women's hockey.

"It's a welcoming environment," she said. "We're also finding an older generation of women that never had this opportunity to do something like this and are now becoming big fans of the league."

Among those who say they have discovered a new-found love of hockey through the PWHL is Treena Grevatt, a native of Gloucestershire in England who emigrated to Canada in 2000.

Speaking to the BBC from her home in Ottawa, Ms Grevatt said that hockey and the men's National Hockey League, or NHL, "never really resonated with her".

"I'd go to be social, if I got a free ticket," she said.

That all changed, she recalls, when a friend told her that a PWHL team was headed to Canada's capital.

"I want to support pro women's sports... this is really the first opportunity I had to put my money where my mouth is," she said.

Choking back tears, Ms Grevatt said that her first game was "ridiculously emotional" and that she felt moved by her peers in the audience, who ranged from former athletes to young children, boys and girls alike.

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