Gare Joyce - Young Leafs: The Making of a New Hockey History

To King Clancy, Pat Burns, and Pat Quinn, three Hockey Hall of Famers I met going back to the Gardens. Yeah, I know, if only you had these kids to work with.

A ROOKIE FORWARD NAMED JAKE Guentzel slowed to a stop along the boards on the right wing, seemingly innocently enough. He had a poor angle, no room, and no view of the Toronto Maple Leafs net. Another rookie, a defenceman from Moscow named Nikita Zaitsev, stood directly in front of Guentzel, had him locked up and shut down. And behind Zaitsev was forty feet of open ice to the Toronto net, where goaltender Curtis McElhinney watched what looked like nothing much unfold. Guentzel threw the puck towards the net, a what-the-hell-why-not shot. Guentzels shot wasnt a hard onenot even a shot at all, reallybut it pinballed like it had eyes. First it deflected off Zaitsevs right skate and was heading well wide of the netat least until Zaitsevs partner on defence, Jake Gardiner, facing McElhinney, tried to kick it up to his stick. At the very moment the puck hit Gardiners skate you could see it in Gardiners posture: reflexive regret. He realized he couldnt get his stick on the puck in time. Worse, McElhinney was on the other side of the net, giving him little chance to get back in position. He pushed hard to his right and seemed to have it covered, but then the puck slid between his legs, trickling over the goal line, not even moving fast enough to reach the back of the net.

That made the score Pittsburgh 3, Toronto 2. It was the 238th goal given up by the Leafs in the season. And yet Guentzels goal, the one that came in Game 81, the second-to-last of the season, was the stuff that heartbreak is made of, this time enriched by psychic plutonium. The stakes were higher that night than they had been all season long. With a wina desperately needed winthe Leafs would be through to the postseason. With a loss in regulation, well, it wouldnt be over, but it would look bleak, to say the least.

There were thirteen minutes to go in the game. It was 9:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, but the Toronto Maple Leafs season neared midnight.

A sense of dread pervaded the crowd, from the platinum seats where swells dropped $500 a head on a nights entertainment to the very upper bowl, the 300 level, where a diehard on an economy plan might be able to get away with a C-note and change. As McElhinney pulled the puck from the back of the net, a collective thought bubble hung above the crowd: Again . Those fans who led a more deeply self-examined life only used that as a starting point. They had to question all that had come before. Was it all just a horrific tease, some grim, existential joke? A tortuous winter had led to this seemingly torturous end as spring was on the city. Now they could see the grand and awful design, that their team should go down, that it would be a self-inflicted wound, that all those good things from the eighty previous games would be kicked away. We have met the laughingstock, and it is us. Again.

In other recent seasons, fans had known few good times and inevitable despair. Just one year earlier, it might not have even risen as high as despairit had started with losing and ended the same way, rarely interrupted with any good turns as the team finished last in the NHL. Fans were so practiced in losing, they couldnt be bothered to boo. This season, though, had been a ride. An uneven one, yes. As always, there had been some tough nights. But still, in thirty-nine previous home games, the team had lost in regulation only twelve times, and in the previous month, they had been making a push to the playoffs. So much promise, and then Guentzels goal made the prospect of the season not lasting twenty-four more hours all too real. Over the winter, something amazing had seemed to be within the teams grasp. But over the seasons last week, it had been slipping away.

The producer was in the ear of the cameramen for a Hockey Night in Canada broadcast, who knew to look for a crowd reaction. He zoomed in on one towheaded kid, bent over in his seat, his head fully buried in his hands. His anguish was well beyond his years, just a grade schooler, likely one whose father wasnt alive when the Leafs won the Cup back in 67, yet somehow representative of all Maple Leafs fans.

The dread at the Air Canada Centre gave off a low-grade electric hum. The crowd hadnt sounded this way all year. The likes of it hadnt really been heard since the arena was raisedthis dashed-hopes fusion of shortness of breath, hearts skipping a beat, and flop sweat. The hush that fell over the arena allowed those in the 300 level to hear the puck hit the blades of sticks and players voices calling out.

It wasnt so complicated on the ice.

Things never are, really. The home team with everything to play for was trailing the defending Stanley Cup champions, who had nothing to play for. The home team was a young team. For a couple, this was the first Game 81 of their career; for others, not much more than that. The champions were practiced at this stuff. They were priming themselves, reloading for a deep run into spring.

The home team had an array of precocious talent, including a young player who was the consensus favourite to win the Calder Trophy, the award that goes to the leagues best rookie. This was all new, and maybe, in just getting this far, they had shot their bolt.

The away team had rested several players in advance of the playoffs, but Sidney Crosby, the two-time Hart Trophy winner and two-time Olympic gold medalist, was not one of them. Nor was Phil Kessel, who had been the Leafs most convenient scapegoat for six seasons until hed been traded a couple of summers before.

You had to wonder what the NHL schedule-makers had been thinking when they drew up the last week of the season for the Maple Leafs, a frantic race to the finish, five games in seven nights. Every team would have had a patch or two like this, a ridiculous compression of the schedule to accommodate the World Cup back in the fall and the weeklong midseason break that all teams get thanks to lobbying from the NHL Players Association. It was simply the Leafs dumb luck that their worst rush would be at seasons end.

Of course, the schedule-makers likely assumed that the league would have sorted itself out by the end of the season. Those who had a shot at a Stanley Cup would have emerged, and those who were looking to land in the lottery would have been long submerged. On the former count, yes, things had been mostly sorted outseven teams in each conference were in, with Pittsburgh, of course, among them for the eleventh season in a row. The Leafs, however, were precipitously on the bubble that Saturday night.

Every time the puck was dropped throughout the last two or three months, the Leafs had heard that this was their biggest game of the season. They had heard it as recently as two nights before, when they lay down against Tampa Bay, a game they wanted to believe was an aberration.

Over the next five minutes, the Leafs rolled over the boards and looked punched out, like a boxer grown arm-weary. They seemed overtaken by events: five full minutes without a whistle, up and back and up and back, six line changes and counting, coach Mike Babcock rolling all four lines, trying to squeeze an extra shift for Auston Matthews.

The hum gradually gave way to silence. Nineteen thousand people, and not a shout to be heard. No horn blowing. No cheers, no Go Leafs Go. The crowd turned utterly still, not like an arena so much as a waiting room.

With eight and a half minutes left, the whistle finally blew, and Pittsburgh defenceman Mark Streit took a penalty for hauling down Leo Komarov behind the Penguins net. Even on the power play, though, the Leafs were flat. Somehow they kept possession and applied some pressure, but a little of the fine touch had gone out of the game. Time was winding down. The shots on goal in the third period told the story of the games direction: Pittsburgh 2, Toronto 9.