The decade-long run of reasonable success really did give Leafs fans a sense of entitlement, an expectation that things would not only stay the same but that they would likely get even better. Back in 2002, I, like pretty much all my Leafs Nation brethren, thought that the numerals 1-9-6-7 signified Canada’s Centennial year. I’m not sure I even think about Canada’s 100th birthday when I see “1967” written anywhere now. I know precisely what it means: the last Stanley Cup victory for the Leafs.
Lost in the desert of missed playoffs and early springs, Leafs fans now grasp wins in pretty much the same way as their detractors used to say they did way back when, when all those unseemly comments really weren’t true. The Leafs won an average of thirty-four games in the five seasons between the fall of 2007 and the spring of 2012. If you extend that period back two additional years to include the first seven seasons since the NHL lockout wiped out the 2004–05 season, the number nudges up to an average of thirty-six wins per year. Those stats, especially the number from the past five years (because it’s more reflective of the Brian Burke managerial regime) really hits home. Most people who are gainfully employed get paid every two weeks. That means twenty-six times a year. The comparison struck me because a Leafs victory now really does feel like payday, that’s how rarely it happens.
I’m not sure fans need the Leafs to win the Stanley Cup to make all this longing fade away. The NHL, like all the professional sports leagues, is an incredibly difficult milieu to cast your lot in. There are thirty teams, and only one wins the championship each year. Former Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment head Richard Peddie used to shamelessly exploit this fact to justify the Leafs’ lack of success. What Peddie ignored is the one simple thing that Leafs fans want, and that’s a chance to feel good again. Make the playoffs, win a round or two, make spring synonymous with playoff hockey again. Those four springs in Toronto — 1993, 1994, 1999, and 2002 — when the Leafs made it to the penultimate round made everyone feel alive. Of course, you wished it lasted a bit longer, but Toronto was gripped with a belief, a feeling that was in the air. It was as if the warm spring air was somehow connected to the hockey team; as if the Leafs were helping us breathe. Everyone, even those who wouldn’t know a hockey puck from a grapefruit, believed in the Leafs. Get to that stage often enough and the Leafs will eventually win the Stanley Cup and the numerals 1-9-6-7 will go back to meaning Canada’s Centennial.
I believed back in 2001 in Germany, as well. I eventually found that bar in Hanover and watched as the Leafs took on the New Jersey Devils in an Eastern Conference semifinal series. Tomas Kaberle scored the winner with less than a minute left in the game. The result put the Leafs in control with a three-games-to-two lead heading back to Toronto.
I wound my way back to my guesthouse in Hanover, wanting to tell the first person I saw on those deserted streets how happy I was. I didn’t care that they would have been German and likely didn’t give two shakes of lederhosen about a hockey game taking place across the Atlantic Ocean, especially since the world championship was going on in the city. It was middle-of-the-night late and even the bawdy houses were closed down, not that the pleasure on offer in them could have approached what I was feeling as I skipped back to my room.
A few days later, with the Devils having won Game 6 to tie the series at three games apiece, I arrived back in Toronto literally an hour before the puck drop in the decisive seventh. My then-girlfriend, now-wife, scooped me up at the airport and we drove straight to a sprawling sports bar in Toronto’s west end to watch the game. Things were looking good when Steve Thomas scored to give the Leafs a 1–0 lead — I’m not sure the world could have been a better place. On this warm night in May the Leafs were on the verge of winning a playoff series that would have meant they were one of just four teams vying for the Stanley Cup.
You know what happened next. Thomas’s goal was the last one of that Leafs season as the Devils poured in four in the second period on their way to a 5–1 win.
The pain seared through me. All I could think about was that guy in the window a few days earlier.
3
May 25, 1993
I can still hear the click of the Ticketmaster machine. And I remember the date: the morning of May 25, 1993. I had just finished an overnight shift working on the cleaning crew at the Honda plant in Alliston, Ontario. Dropped off at home by the contractor who drove us to work each day, I rushed in, grabbed my bike, and made a beeline for the Kozlov Centre, the main ticket outlet in my hometown of Barrie, Ontario.
Back in the days before Internet searching and even before the wristband policy that helped regulate crowds trying to get sports and concert tickets, it was possible to try your luck simply by lining up. It was completely hit and miss, of course, and during that glorious Leafs playoff run that spring there were times when not a single person of the dozens who lined up early each morning was getting a ticket.
For some reason the line was moving on the morning of Game 5 of the Campbell Conference Final. The rhythmic clicking of the machine spitting out tickets continued as I neared the front of the line. Every ticket that was being issued was decidedly low-end: high greys, standing room — the bottom of the barrel, seating-wise. With a limit of two each, my friend in front of me landed a pair. Then it was my turn.
I got the last ticket, a grey in the second-to-last row of the Gardens. I know it was the last one on offer because as the machine tried to punch out a second one it stopped with the ticket still half inside the machine.
“I’m sorry,” said the agent.
I didn’t care. I was going to the Gardens that night. The second ticket that sat stuck in the machine had been earmarked for anyone I could find who was willing to pony up, as I recall, $40 for the seat. I would be sitting alone, but I had a seat and a ride down to Toronto with my friend who had secured the pair in front of me.
That spring in the Toronto area was unlike anything anyone could have imagined even six months earlier. It was the first prolonged playoff run by the Leafs in fifteen years and a by-product of the hiring of Pat Burns as coach and one of the most lopsided trades in the history of the NHL. Doug Gilmour and a collection of other players, including defenceman Jamie Macoun and role player Kent Manderville, had come to Toronto from the Calgary Flames for Gary Leeman and spare parts.
I had an odd perspective on the trade because the Calgary general manager at the time was Doug Risebrough. Risebrough’s late mother and my father were brother and sister, making us first cousins. Though we were separated in age by almost two decades, his playing career with the Montreal Canadiens and later with the Flames provided a happy sidelight to my obsession with hockey, both playing and watching it, while growing up. I don’t profess to know Risebrough — I’ve had no more than ten meaningful conversations with him in my life. The one enduring memory I have of his days with the 1970s Canadiens dynasty is playing checkers with our shared grandmother and great-grandmother in their home in Collingwood, Ontario, because a photo of him with the Stanley Cup always hung nearby in the kitchen. But many people knew of the connection, and it always meant my buddies asked about him when I was a really young kid growing up. After Risebrough had won four Stanley Cups with the Canadiens as a player, my friends and I were a bit older and the family connection with a real-life NHL player basically lost its appeal.
However, not long after Gilmour came to Toronto it was obvious that the old silver fox, Cliff Fletcher, the former Flames GM, had fleeced his protégé, Risebrough, in the trade. Suddenly anyone who had vague memories of us being cousins had an opinion on Risebrough, and often not a flattering one. I defended Risebrough, though I’ve since learned to keep my mouth shut around people from Calgary.
