Leafs provide diversion in the midst of pandemic
Thoughts about pro hockey stay fresh in our minds as the world changes daily
If ever a season deserved an ending, it was this year and this Toronto Maple Leafs team.
It needed something to help us understand what it is they were — and what it is they were going to be and what is was we were watching so much of the time.
It needed something to understand where they were going, if they were going anywhere, if they could eventually lift themselves beyond their daily occurrences to become what Brendan Shanahan and Kyle Dubas believe they will become.
What a strange 70 games this was for the Leafs, their own hockey volume of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly — with too much bad and too much ugly. They played most of their NHL season as a great unknown, trying to determine who they were, trying to become a team of consequence, paddling in circles mostly, and now it stops. Just stops. Like reading a novel that’s lost its final chapters. Like nothing we’ve ever known or experienced before.
Our lives aren’t about sports right now, nor should they be. We’re trying to live safely, trying to be healthy and smart and prudent. We now wash our hands over and over each day. We now consume the daily statistics of the virus the way we would regularly read box scores.
How many cases? How many infected? What are the numbers? What are the percentages?
And other questions. What’s open today? What’s closed today? What is closing tomorrow. How much is the stock market dropping? How cheap is gas when we don’t really need gas?
It’s all consuming and it should be all consuming. And we have no idea when life will return to what we might call normal. Whatever normal is for you and me.
So I feel just a little sporting selfish writing about hockey here because really it doesn’t matter.
It’s recreation. It’s entertainment.
But we can’t talk virus every day, all day. That will defeat us. It will bring us down, more than we’re already down.
We still need diversions of some kind. Television might be fine for a while, but for how long? Reading is encouraged but you can’t read all day, every day.
So I was in the grocery store the other day, not hoarding toilet paper, and after that I made stops at the local butcher shop and the drugstore. You run into people you know in your neighbourhood. And when you do, they ask the usual questions: How are you? How’s your family? Is everybody safe?
And somehow the conversation twists, the way it always seems to twist for me at the barber shop, or the local deli, or my favourite pizza place: What about the Leafs?
Maybe it isn’t said in exactly those words, but in the days since the NBA and NHL and everybody else shut down, there is a power the Leafs maintain that I’m not sure exists anywhere else in this city. When they’re not playing, when we don’t know if there will be an end to the season or a playoffs to follow, when we don’t know anything really at all, people still want to talk about the Leafs.
On a Sunday morning radio talk show I happened to be a guest on, I was asked about the coming salary cap, and asked if they’ll be able to maintain their four big names — Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Mitch Marner and William Nylander — and the question almost seemed silly to me.
Like why does that matter right now? And now not knowing much, will there be hockey this year? Will there be anything resembling playoffs? What happens to the salary cap next season? What happens to our lives?
It hit me later, after I hung up the phone. When businesses are closing, investment portfolios are crumbling, when medical practices aren’t taking face-toface appointments, when your local gym is closing, when people are told to work from home, this is the power of the Leafs.
They make us think about them when there is nothing to think about. They stay fresh in our minds when our world is changing every day and we have no idea what is coming tomorrow.
It took a pandemic, a world crisis, to shut down so much of our lives. For us, this is just the first few days of what seems to be a long haul of some kind.
There’s nothing wrong with talking sports occasionally as a diversion from another long day.
The unusual power of the Maple Leafs — even on our worst days they still seem to matter.
What a strange 70 games this was for the Leafs, their own hockey volume of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly — with too much bad and too much ugly.