Читать книгу Hope and Heartbreak in Toronto. Life as a Maple Leafs Fan онлайн

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The time since the NHL lockout ended in 2005 has been an inexcusable failure because the Leafs can’t make the post-season. Their record during the 1980s and early 1990s was about the same, and often worse, though the masses kept pouring into Maple Leaf Gardens just like they do now at Air Canada Centre.

So, in the wider view, since 1967 they haven’t exactly been Three Stooges bad because of the ten-or-so years of competence, but also nowhere near the rarefied air they occupied up until they last won the Stanley Cup. The problem is that I don’t remember those halcyon days when the Leafs more or less went blow-for-blow with the Montreal Canadiens. This is because I was still several years away from sucking in my first breath. You have to be about fifty years old to even remember a Leafs Stanley Cup win and older to have appreciated its significance at the time. The rest of us are left to grasp at small victories. And, boy, can we ever cling to those!

If loving the Leafs is like an addiction, then the four visits to conference finals since 1993 are the proverbial crack houses. The last one came in 2002, and if I allow myself to dream, it was like it was yesterday. The Leafs played twenty games over a period of six weeks and had to fight tooth-and-nail for everything as the team was decimated by injuries and came up against two very determined squads in the first two rounds. First it was the New York Islanders and then the Ottawa Senators, both of them falling to the Leafs in seven games. But the Leafs were ultimately stopped by the Carolina Hurricanes in six games in the Eastern Conference final.