Hope and Heartbreak in Toronto by Peter Robinson

Author:Peter Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn Press Limited
Published: 2012-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Trying to beat back the aging process a bit after celebrating my thirtieth birthday a few years before, I took up the game again in 2005. The ebb and flow of Toronto’s recreational hockey scene has many levels and elements, but one common theme if you play in the city is the Maple Leafs.

Go out to a rec hockey session, and if you’re playing with ten others, you’ll likely find eleven opinions about the state of the Leafs. Dressing rooms from Woodbridge to Whitby are filled with half-baked theories of what should be done to fix the team.

It was around the same time as my return to playing rec hockey that blogs and fan sites, and later Twitter and other social media, began to reshape the media landscape. The various forms of new media have added a lively edge to Leafs coverage because it tends to be a more accurate reflection of the joy (yes, there still is some joy), pain, and sorrow Leafs fans go through, rather than a conventional journalist’s interpretation of it all. In other words, blogs and Twitter are merely a reflection of the various zingers that fly around hockey dressing rooms. And, boy, are there some dunderhead comments.

Assess the plausibility of this nugget from one Leafs fan: when then-Leaf forward Nik Antropov was coming to the end of his contract in February 2009, one guy I encountered regularly while playing hockey honestly believed it would be possible to trade the inconsistent Kazakh forward for Sidney Crosby, straight up.

“Have you lost your mind?” was my response.

“No,” said my surprisingly confident friend. “Think about it. Crosby will want to come here because it’s Toronto so you won’t have to give up as much as other teams would. But Antropov can be a really good player if he wasn’t surrounded by all the pressure of playing in Toronto.”

Whew, how an otherwise high-functioning human being could come up with that logic is anyone’s guess. At the time, Crosby was in the midst of a season that would later culminate in his first Stanley Cup triumph with the Penguins. He had already re-signed with the Penguins and there was nothing indicating he was unhappy in Pittsburgh and would want to move.

The Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia–raised superstar also grew up a Montreal Canadiens fan and has never, not once, given any indication of any sort of allegiance to the Leafs, aside from torching them most times when he visits as a member of the Penguins.

When all these facts were pointed out to my out-of-touch hockey mate, he was adamant that it could happen, but had clearly been unaware of Crosby’s background, including that he grew up near Halifax a die-hard Canadiens fan.

From the wider view, if you accept that hockey know-how is tied in to success, Toronto’s lack of it makes sense in an odd sort of way. A team that hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967 is not likely to have as knowledgeable a fan base as Calgary or Montreal.

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