I bought a banana tree in August of 2021 and never thought it would actually fruit. I was walking by it the other night and saw something purple/maroon out of the corner of my eye. Popped my head between some leaves and was greeted by some baby bananas!
Disclaimer: I’m a microbiologist, not a botanist, although I took a bunch of botany and mycology courses to fill my elective requirements and for… recreational reasons.
There are a few cultivars, like double mahoi, that’ll produce fruit twice before dying back, but 5-6 is unusual.
The usual cycle is a single “trunk” (pseudostem) will grow, flower, fruit, then die. As it grows, it’ll produce daughter plants which appear as additional, initially smaller trunks which follow the same cycle, just offset in time from the parent plant.
Did your plant have multiple trunks? If so, it was actually multiple plants. If not, you possibly had a plant with a novel mutation that could have been very lucrative.