Game 3: The Leafs Blow in to Town

Ken Wregget sighting!

Sigmund Freud believed that, in the early years of childhood, we are all polymorphous perverse; our sexuality, as yet unfettered by societal norms, is not directed at a specific target, but at any possible source of pleasure.  Desires that will later become forbidden are entertained in our innocent minds, and we're happy, blissfully ignorant of the constraints soon to be placed on our developing libidos.

A similar process happens with sports fandom.  When you watch hockey as a kid, you respond to the sounds, the colors, the speed, the guys running into each other.   You start to find players you like based on their style, their personalities, their nicknames, and you form affinities that don't necessarily jibe with your socially proscribed rooting interests - i.e., your hometown team.

Case in point: I grew up in Pittsburgh as a Penguins fan, but I was never just a Penguins fan.  I pored over playing cards, read The Hockey News, and formed opinions on players I probably had only seen play a couple of times, if even that.  Maybe after seeing so much of the Penguins, being spoiled by Lemieux and Jagr and Francis, it felt exotic and exciting to root for guys from other teams, to pick other teams that I liked (some from foreign countries, even!) and root for them.  It gave me, I imagined, cachet, made me more worldly than the provincial shlubs who couldn't appreciate players wearing anything other than black and gold.  Of course, the vital difference between me and them was that I was free to root for whoever I wanted; nobody is going to get on a kid for being "fair-weather," or "bandwagon," or, worst of all, a "traitor."  

It's an extremely fun way to enjoy a sport, and while it's by no means restricted to children - in fact, the geniuses at basketball blog FreeDarko built their appreciation of the game around this concept, which they call "liberated fandom" - it did seem like there came a time when I was expected to grow up and settle down with a single team, til death do us part.

Which brings us, finally, to tonight's home opener, which will see the Toronto Maple Leafs come to the CEC.  My family used to travel to Toronto every year for vacation, and since it was this cool, metropolitan, hockey-crazed, Canadian city, it was a paradise to my impressionable eyes.  And their hockey team, it was great.  They were led by Doug Gilmour, who tucked his jersey in one one side and had great hair and was a fantastic scorer and an equally fantatic defensive player.  I adopted him as one of my own, bought his jersey, and became a full-fledged (no...a half-fledged, really) Leafs fan.  Gilmour, along with tough wingers Wendel Clark and Dave Andreychuk, awesomely nicknamed goalie Felix "The Cat" Potvin, made the Leafs a year-to-year contender in the early-mid-90s, and one of the most watchable teams of the era, especially in those beautiful sweaters.

As that team aged and faded, Mats Sundin arrived in Toronto as a franchise savior, and kept the team competitive into the aughts. Since then, however, things have tailspinned/tailspun.  The Leafs haven't made the playoffs in the last 7 years, and a look at their roster makes it pretty clear that they are a ways off from being a contender.

The NHL is a lot more fun when the Maple Leafs are good.  Their fans are awesome, their uniforms are awesome, their city is awesome.  Their ownership has been deplorable in "building" this marginal, boring, directionless team.  I would love to see them win again very very soon, because those childhood loves die hard.  Just not tonight.  Go Pens.