up with a Ford Pinto in the garage.
The Leafs did their level best to make their coach and general manager feel right at home again, which is to say that they played like complete donkeys, losing 5–1 and eliciting a number of sarcastic barbs from Wilson to the media after the game. Under normal circumstances, the game was about as exciting as you would expect from a mid-week tilt between two non-playoff teams coming off a long break. When compared to events of the previous seventeen days, it was like seventeen years of uninterrupted white noise.
“Welcome home, coach. Are you happy to see that things haven’t changed?”
But the game had a modestly entertaining side story playing out while the Leafs were getting their hats handed to them. Ponikarovsky, who had played for the Ukraine two long-ago Olympic cycles earlier, was announced as one of the pre-game scratches. As much angst as Ponikarovsky contributed to the collective mindset of Leafs fans over the years — he never fulfilled the potential hung on him for almost a decade — it was clear something was up. The trade deadline loomed a couple days hence and the big Ukrainian’s pending free agent status after the season made him prime trade bait. A few fans in my section — 311 greens — were dutifully trolling the Internet on their hand-held devices to try to get a hint of any tangible action involving Ponikarovsky. It turned out the big lunk had been dealt to the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The return? A local kid named Luca Caputi.
Two days after watching the most thrilling Team Canada game of the modern era, talk suddenly switched to a trade involving a player who was a decade-long “what-if” as a Maple Leaf and a kid who, as it turned out, played just twenty-six games for them.
Only in Toronto.
7
Creating More Leafs Fans
Make babies or watch the hockey game? Can’t you do both?
No, this isn’t some crude rehash of the old joke about a certain sexual position and still being able to watch Hockey Night in Canada. It involves having secured Leafs tickets on the same night your wife’s meticulous charting tells her that she’s likely ovulating.
Now that’s a conflict.
Ask any couple who want to have children — it doesn’t just involving snapping their fingers. The whole process can be a bit stressful. Ask the male half of that coupling just how stressful when it also involves planning around the Leafs, and, if his wife were within earshot, the answer may permanently impair his ability to produce children.
The night was February 20, 2007, and the Leafs were in a futile struggle to get into a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. The Boston Bruins were in town and trailing the Leafs in the chase to get inside the top eight teams.
It was an important night not only at the Air Canada Centre but also at a nicely appointed semi-detached starter home in Toronto’s west end, where the Robinsons hung their shingle at the time. Earlier that day, my frantic searching on the Internet had produced two tickets for the pending Leafs–Bruins tilt. A $160-something-plus-fees purchase was allayed by colleague and good friend Jason Logan, who was willing to pick up his share of the tab. Arrangements were made to meet on the Jane Station subway platform in time to get downtown for a few prime-the-pump pints and what was supposed to be a spirited tilt, a rarity for mid-week games.
The only pending obligation to that point was to walk my dad’s dog, who was a house guest while my father was travelling. Aussie, the four-legged family member, was his usual accommodating self, bounding through our neighbourhood with that canine smile only yellow Labradors are capable of. He was just happy that someone was paying attention to him. To be honest, though, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to him at all — I was distracted and just wanted to get downtown.
Heading back up the driveway, Aussie was pulling me along, knowing a treat waited at the other side of our side door. Little did I know that there was also something waiting for me on the other side of that door.
Now, Mrs. Robinson has endured a tremendous amount of impulsive activity on her husband’s part since shortly after we met in the summer of 2000. (True story: we met at my family reunion — she was there as a guest of my cousin and is not an actual relative.)
Our first date a few days later included three table changes, ostensibly because the sun was in my eyes. In reality, I was so nervous, I needed to get out of the sun because I was paranoid that she would notice I was sweating (my sunglasses would have solved the sun issue but remained tucked nicely inside a pocket so as not to give away my ruse).
She didn’t notice a thing. The date went well, as did subsequent ones. I think she even started to like me. Poor woman.
We were married in November 2003. The Leafs were in the midst of a western trip and tied the San Jose Sharks 2–2 on our wedding night. The marriage got off to a good start: she said all the right things about my wedding speech, in which I made reference to not having children until the Leafs win the Stanley Cup.
But it soon became obvious that if I didn’t want to be an old, grey, angry Leafs fan with no offspring, I’d better reconsider. So, in the fall of 2006 I accepted that I should drop the precondition and get down to the brass tacks of procreation.
But some of that impulsive behaviour started to pop up: buying Leafs tickets. I had always been a fan and went to several games a year. Now I was going to dozens of them. Aside from the occasional raised eyebrow, my wife took it all in stride and was happy to offer the occasional shoulder to cry on when I came home slightly annoyed and slightly inebriated.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, my Leafs habit, the attempt-at-pregnancy thing wasn’t quite as easy as slipping down to the Air Canada Centre. Trying was all good fun for the first few months, until we realized we didn’t have the same biological makeup of teenagers on reality TV.
More substantial methods were undertaken. And that took some of the fun out of it, to be honest. Suddenly the normally enjoyable business of trying to create babies became more, well, robotic. Like math class without your clothes on. Charting, temperature-taking.
Mrs. Robinson spent increasing amounts of time with her nose in a massive book that reminded me of a university textbook I wouldn’t dare think of reading, even in university. The book, and my wife’s head stuck in it, became a ubiquitous presence around our house. She also took to visiting websites that made the whole business seem more like a chemistry project.
Things were starting to get a bit testy, and my normally easy-going better half suddenly had one rule: if it was time, it didn’t matter what was going on, I had to drop everything I was doing and take action.
I distinctly recall adjusting my work schedule and, gasp, missing the occasional shinny skate to stick around the house waiting for that time. There were even times when I suggested a practice run but she waved me off in order not to spoil things when she entered the fertility red zone.
So, as the clock ticked just past five o’clock on the day in question, Mrs. Robinson suddenly struck that look just as Aussie pounced for a dog biscuit.
Talk about a dilemma.
On the one hand, Leafs tickets in my pocket, a ravenous animal tethered to my arm, and an oblivious friend on the verge of arriving on the subway platform several hundred metres up the road, and on the other, my wife before me, who never makes any unreasonable demands, with the temerity to demand sex. Right then.
The horror.
