How strange to wake up the morning after the Leafs are eliminated and not feel like taking a long soak in a tub of hydrochloric acid.“There’s always next year,” was something we mumbled to one another as kids each spring, after our sad-sack heroes played their final game. “Next year will be better.”This was the ’80s and membership in Leafs Nation came with only one guarantee: heartache. So you learned to extract joy from small things — “Man, that Al Iafrate can really slap it from the point!” “See that glove save by Wregget?” “Derlago just won two faceoffs in a row!” “Frycer deked Moog!” — while overlooking the big thing, which was that next year could not possibly be better.What did we know? We were kids, dreamers, born into this land. The organization back then was basically North Korea, a rogue state run by a madman. Greed, incompetence — this was the axis of evil. Yet if Harold Ballard had traded away every player, slapped skates on circus bears and given the head coach job to a flowering shrub — all of which was within the realm of possibility — we would have still cheered for our lovable losers because our loyalty was immune to reason.We got by on the fumes of misplaced hope.So on Sunday night, as the Leafs got knocked out of the Stanley Cup chase after an overtime playoff loss to Washington, I couldn’t help but smile as my daughters frowned. Chin up, girls. No misplaced hope for you. Should you decide to permanently invite the Maple Leafs into your heart — and, admittedly, it’s a crowded place right now with Monster High, gymnastics and the sputtering Blue Jays — the nucleus and chemistry of this hockey team seems sure to trigger years of joy, excitement and, most different from my own youth, triumphs of the real kind.That series against Washington was a real puck to the helmet for any Leafs fan w ...
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