The Pain Of A Deluded Fandom

NHL Gears Up For Hockey Playoffs; One Team's Fans Ask What They Are Being Punished For

Toronto (CP) The Stanley Cup playoffs are starting in a few days. Some teams have clinched their spots. Others are still fighting for a wild card spot. And others have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, much to the chagrin of their fandom. Nowhere is this more true than in Toronto, where the Maple Leafs are finishing off what turned out to be an awful year, out of the playoffs and feeling disappointed.

The general manager has already been fired. More firings are expected, along with more trades from the team during the off season. Pundits are predicting another ten year rebuild, expected to go nowhere like all the others. The Leafs last won the Cup in 1967, and true as clockwork, whether it's in the regular season or early on in the playoffs, they keep breaking the hearts of their fans, Leafs Nation, with disturbing regularity.

Blame is being thrown around in the bars of Leafs Nation. They point to players who have been traded off to other teams, and are finding some measure of success. They look to conspiracy theories about why things keep going wrong for their team. They are somewhere in the five stages of grief- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance- with most of them in the first two stages. Bartenders are busy with their springtime routine of consoling the masses while doing a brisk business of selling alcohol.

It is part of a tried and true pattern. When the season starts, Leafs fans are in a buoyant mood, claiming that this year is going to be the year, the same as they do for every year for nearly sixty years now. And then at some point, things go horribly wrong. It might be during the season, or it might be in the playoffs, when their team crushes their hopes by self-destructing on the ice. Psychologists have explained the phenomena as a hopeless and incurable delusion passed down through generations.

Some break the cycle. "I was a Leafs fan growing up," Bob Parson told this reporter. "My dad was too. But all those years, feeling heartbreak and sorrow and despair..." He shook his head. "Five years ago, my wife gave birth to our first child. And that made the decision for me. We decided enough is enough, and that our kids shouldn't be raised in an environment where their hearts get stomped on every year and nothing ever changes. So the wife and I burned our Leafs memorabilia and jerseys and stopped getting season tickets. It was hard. But with time, you realize how much you gave of yourself to this team, and that you got nothing back."

Other fans will never learn. This reporter ran into one of Leafs Nation's most ardent fans at a downtown bar. He was still in the denial stage. "It just isn't ****ing right, y'know? They're our boys! And the Cup belongs here, now and ****ing forever! But this keeps happenin'! And it keeps hurtin' and hurtin' and hurtin' some more! Me and Harry and Jack, we're the biggest fans ever of this ****in' team, believe me! And we keep gettin' screwed over!"

The fan sighed, shook his head, and continued. "Yeah, it hurts. But you know, that's what booze is for. To numb the pain and make it all feel better. And Leafs Nation... we're gonna get through this. We're gonna keep with our boys, because we bleed Maple Leaf blue forever. And sure, it's gonna be a long hard summer, and it'll be even harder if Montreal or Edmonton win the Cup. But we'll get past it. Because sooner or later, trust me... that Cup is comin' home!!!! And it's gonna be a party the likes of which no one has ever seen!!"

After the fan had gone off to join his friends and drown their sorrows some more, this reporter spoke with his bartender, who said, "He's taking it really hard. Depending on how drunk he gets, he might say Gary Bettman is making the refs screw the team over. Other times he's going on about how the team just doesn't want to win games. He'll be on this roller coaster into July, if you ask me."

Hockey pundits have also been asking how the team might fare in the off-season with draft picks. "They didn't finish at the bottom of the basement," Hockey Now writer Cal Thornton told this reporter. "And there's that bad habit of the team to squander draft picks in favour of a guy who's on the downslope of his career. Have I mentioned that's a bad habit? It's been suggested that the last part of the season, they were tanking just to get themselves in a good position for the draft. And they couldn't even get that right. Go figure."

For now, the pain is fresh. The tears are real. The broken hearts in Leafs Nation feel the weight of the world. Perhaps time will mend the wounds. Perhaps some will wake up and end their fandom. Perhaps the performance of the Blue Jays in baseball might give Toronto fans something to root for. As the summer goes along, the bad memories will fade for Leafs Nation, no doubt, as it does each year. And come October, the cycle will start all over again, with Leafs Nation claiming that this will be their year. All while their team gets ready to screw it up all over again.