The answer’s the same, it’s the question that has finally changed for this team

There was a time where, if you asked of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Why Not Them, there was an assortment of granite-solid answers waiting for you.

The long years of comically venal ownership, for instance, every one of them like an empty whiskey bottle hurled at the head of the fan base, after which the fan base was asked to pay for the privilege of the gift.

The many bumbling front-office aspirants, treating the draft like a garage sale, rendered panicked or complacent by the pressure, chasing get-rich-quick schemes that would make a Florida con man blush.

The players who, year after year, simply weren’t good enough.

It was perfect, how they stopped winning as soon as there were more than six teams in the league, and in the end, you could boil all those years of futile, sorry history into a simple answer about Toronto and the Stanley Cup. Why Not Them? Because They’re The Leafs. And now, as the 2017-18 season opens, those words have a chance to carry entirely different weight.

The National Hockey League looks like parity has flattened it even further. The Leafs are emitting signs of a volcano about to erupt. An improved Auston Matthews should be a Hart Trophy candidate, and alone could drag a team into playoff contention. But he’s not alone. Why not the Leafs? “We think that too,” defenceman Morgan Rielly says.

“But we’ve got to go out and do it. But when you look at our top three lines, and our goalie, and our (defence), I think we have a lot of confidence in ourselves. We’re capable of beating anybody.

“So we have the mentality of ‘why not us?’ but you also have to have the mentality of . . . we’re not at the point where Pittsburgh is where they can say, we can go out and do it because we’ve already done it. We don’t have that right yet.”

“I think that’s been our mentality,” defenceman Connor Carrick says. “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. We’ve been on teams where players are good, and other teams where our team’s not that good. We’ve got some talent in this room, and it’s up to us to bring it.”

It’s not like progression is a straight line in the NHL, where one injury (ahem, Frederik Andersen) can derail a team, where the puck can bounce away from you for weeks on end, where Toronto’s league-worst 1-8 shootout record was the difference between being an eighth seed and being, say, fifth.

But look around. The Capitals shed Marcus Johansson, Kevin Shattenkirk, Justin Williams, and more, but retain whatever playoff demons they had before. Pittsburgh has played four extra months of playoff hockey in the past two years. Columbus overachieved last season. The other teams ahead of Toronto last year — Montreal, the Rangers, Ottawa and Boston — are all candidates for a fall. This does not look like a season of powerhouses.

“I don’t think they’re regressing, as opposed to teams progressing, teams getting better, catching up to those teams,” Leafs centre Nazem Kadri says. “I think we’ve been thinking like that for a couple years first. You’ve got to believe in yourself before anybody else does . . . and we believe we can do it in this dressing room. That being said, we’ve got a lot of work to do, we can’t jump to conclusions and just think we’re going to be in the conference final, or the Stanley Cup final, in the blink of an eye.”

That he can just rattle off the destinations is its own indicator of where they think they could go. Why not the Leafs?

The Leafs blew leads last season, but that just meant they had leads to blow. (Only Washington spent more time playing while ahead.) And then they stopped blowing leads. The Leafs squeaked into the playoffs last season, but after Freddie Andersen’s oh-my-god October, they played at a comfortable 99-point pace. Their score-adjusted puck possession numbers were sixth in the league, and the special teams were stellar to competent.

They replaced Matt Hunwick’s and Roman Polak’s minutes with Ron Hainsey and Andreas Borgman. They replaced the fourth-line minutes hodgepodge that included Ben Smith, Frederik Gauthier and Brian Boyle with Dominic Moore and Patrick Marleau, though Connor Brown will start there. And Andersen isn’t shocked to be in Toronto anymore.

Health, luck, all the vagaries of hockey could be obstacles. They all talk about how they have to earn their potential every day. But they don’t deny the potential, either.

“That’s why I came here: I had a feeling this team’s going to do some great things,” Marleau says. “And after being here for a while, you can always have those thoughts and expectations, but you’ve got to pull through somehow. The right ingre- dients are here.”

The old arguments about this team don’t apply anymore, unless someone lets them. Ownership is still manning the cash registers, but they stay out of the way. Management can and does make mistakes, but the record of wins is a lot longer. The players, from Matthews to Mitch Marner to William Nylander to Morgan Rielly to Jake Gardiner to Nazem Kadri to Andersen, are good enough. They believe they are, too. Like Carrick said: They know.

Maybe that question isn’t the right one anymore. Maybe it should be, Why Them? The past isn’t destiny. The Cubs won the World Series. And while you can change the question, if this team lives up to its potential, the same answer will apply: Because they’re the Leafs.

It’ll just mean something entirely new.