So on the one hand, they pretty much needed the seven goals, if not all eight. There’s a circus team in these Toronto Maple Leafs, and sometimes that can mean more than one thing. You could see the good part in the first period of the home opener, when they rang up five goals on the New York Rangers and chased Henrik Lundqvist. Toronto didn’t score five goals in a period all last season, when they scored the fifth-most goals in hockey. They scored seven in the opener in Winnipeg, too, and somewhere there is a newborn child who has never lived in a world where the Leafs don’t score seven goals a game. The Leafs made hockey look easy.But hockey isn’t easy, and maybe it’s good to be reminded. The Leafs scored five goals in a span of 14:49, and gave up four goals in 14:29 between the first and second periods. Remember how they eliminated blown leads as the season went on last year? About that. And on the other hand, they won 8-5, and that’s the good circus part of these Maple Leafs. Jeez, this team. This team is confident in itself, and people are confident in them. The morning of the game Mike Babcock was doing his post-practice run around the Air Canada Centre, and he was in the parking lot, and one of the security guys yells at him. “We believe,” recounted Babcock, affecting a bellowing voice. “We believe.” There’s a lot of that going around, and some of it’s in the dressing room. They won their opener in Winnipeg 7-2, after all. What was it defenceman Connor Carrick said the other day, before it all began? “I think that we want to establish ourselves here early. I think it’s definitely, let’s go. Let’s start. Let’s go. We know.”And then they rang up those five first-period goals without Auston Matthews doing much of anything, and without Mitch Marner denting the scoresheet. Even William Nylander only got one point, though not on the goal that he truly dese ...
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