The quest for the cosmological parameters has come to fruition with the identification of a number of supernovae at a redshift of z \sim 1 .
Analyses of the brightness of these standard candles reveal that the Universe is dominated by a large cosmological constant .
The recent identification of the z \sim 1.7 SN1997ff in the northern Hubble Deep Field has provided further evidence for this cosmology .
Here we examine the case for gravitational lensing of SN1997ff due to the presence of galaxies lying along our line of sight .
We find that , while the alignment of SN1997ff with foreground masses was not favorable for it to be multiply imaged and strongly magnified , two galaxies did lie close enough to result in significant magnification : \mu \sim 1.4 for the case where these elliptical galaxies have velocity dispersion 200 { km / s } .
Given the small difference between supernova brightnesses in different cosmologies , detailed modeling of the gravitational lensing properties of the intervening matter is therefore required before the true cosmological significance of SN1997ff can be deduced .