Blue Blood

I was Doug Favell.

I was Wayne Thomas.

I was Mike Palmateer – my god we were all Mike Palmateer!!

In the basement stopping point blank wristshots from my brother, I was all of them, those heroes from my Saturday night childhood.

It was 1974 - and I know this because I can trace the date back to the style of mask Doug Favell was wearing - and I had my first sporting memory as a young child.
I was finally allowed along to stay up with my older brothers and watch Hockey Night in Canada. I saw Doug Favell – really the epitome of a journeyman goaltender if there ever was one – playing with that Leaf painted over his mask and I was finished.

I didn’t know what it was that drove my brothers and I to watch hockey on Saturday nights. It wasn’t like our parents were big hockey fans in ’75 – not much hockey talk in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Probably, we wanted to know what all the boys were talking about at recess on Monday morning.
My eldest brother didn’t have a burning desire to become a Hockey player; he wanted to be a musician, or a tennis player like Borg, Ashe, and Connors. ( It was the seventies, remember?) He would watch with us on Saturday night, but he wasn’t sick with it like we were. And by we I mean my older brother and I, separated by 18 months but both riddled with the same disease at nearly the same time.
We share this ailment with millions of others, but Sheldon and I have it bad.
What is this affliction that courses through our veins with such fervor?

We have Blue Blood.

Oh he will tell you that he loves Cam Neely, and Ray Bourque. I might tell you how hard I cheered when Patrick Roy was winning his Conn Smythe trophies for Montreal. Sheldon has Bruins jerseys and I might have a few Habitant posters here and there. But the truth is that for us these other teams are like a kind of vaccine, a temporary fix so the disease doesn’t ruin our love for hockey entirely.
We developed a love for the sport, but there was such disarray at the professional level in Toronto from the seventies up till the early nineties, that you had to find another team to follow in the playoffs because Bill Derlago, Fred Boimstruck and Gary Leeman were going to break your heart everytime. Throw in a big dose of Harold Ballard and it is a miracle that anyone still follows the game in Toronto.

This city is sick with Blue Bloods.
My fiancé’s father, a man from a small island in the Mediterranean, asked me on Monday morning to confirm that the Islanders had won, knocking the Leafs out.
- The Leafs got knocked out didn’t they, he asked.
No need to explain what they got knocked out of. We all knew.
Now I will bet my right arm that my sweethearts Dad couldn’t name a single player on the New York Islander roster, from any era.
I am pretty sure that he probably hasn’t watched a full hockey game in over ten years. But he knew that if the Islanders lost the Leafs would be in. In the Playoffs.
And there are millions like him and millions like me, who have seen the failures and collapses and pyrrhic victories pile up until we couldn’t stand it anymore.

I have a theory that when the Leafs win the Stanley Cup, the city of Toronto will go through a renaissance such as this city has never seen. And don’t get me wrong; I understand that the Leafs winning or losing the Stanley Cup won’t make a lick of difference to my Visa bill. And it won’t make it any easier for Toronto to get its fair share of money from the federal government.

I know all that. I’m not six anymore. Mostly I’m not.

The realized collective dream of a Maple Leaf Stanley Cup victory won’t make a bit of difference to the lives of 99.9 per cent of the individuals who will be celebrating. (Truly it will be the players who would be most impacted by claiming the top honour in their profession).
Individually, it won’t matter, but collectively I think that it will. When we wake up after the parades, - and trust me; there will be more than one – and the parties, and all the hoopla that goes with winning the Cup in a Canadian city, I believe that we all take a deep breath a say, ‘Is that it? Now what?’
Because when the great celebration is over, our Visa bills will still be there. We will still have a government subsidized airport on our waterfront that we don’t want. We will still not know who lives in the apartment next to ours, or the house beside ours, except for that now, maybe we will. Maybe when we all celebrate together, not just the Italians, not just the Greeks, not just the English, or the Sri Lankan. What happens when we celebrate as a City about the thing that we have coveted for so long? Well then, I think we might just change the playing field forever. Instead of this hazy multicultural anxiety that currently defines Toronto, we might all feel confident of our place and proud of our City. We might notice how safe our city is, how many opportunities there are, and how much education is available for our children when compared to cities of comparable size the world over.
We might start to feel blessed to be living here.
(I do know that this type of collective outburst isn’t limited to the Leafs. But like our forlorn team, we haven’t had a local figure emerge to galvanize the GTA since the sixties.)

So don’t call me a ‘hater’ when I point out that this current team can’t win.
Don’t hate me for seeing our current Captain for what he is - a great complimentary player, not a foundational leader.
Don’t curse me for laughing at the statement ‘Andrew Raycroft, big time goalie’.

It’s not that I am insensitive, and I am truly not a hater.

I have a problem, a sickness.
It’s my blood.

It’s Blue.