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Oh, The Heartache
 The Toronto Maple Leafs have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967. I have to wonder if I'll ever see them win it in my lifetime. Every year at the start of the playoffs I just "have a feeling" there's a chance they'll win the Stanley Cup. But such is the plight of a Leafs fan. The team usually ends up bowing out in the quarter or semi-finals. This year, they barely made the playoffs and I'm seriously wondering if the players' golf season will start shortly after the first round.
I have been a huge Leafs fan since I was a kid. In the 1970s, my father used to take my brother and sister and I to games at Maple Leaf Gardens. My favourite player was the goalie, Mike Palmateer. Every single year I would expect the Leafs to win the Stanley Cup and every single year I was disappointed yet again. In the early 1980s, the Leafs former owner, the late Harold Ballard, traded away key players like Mike Palmateer, Darryl Sittler and Lanny McDonald and I decided I'd had enough. I stopped watching and caring about hockey for five years. Old habits die hard though and eventually I got sucked back into the whole Leafs fan machine again. My most humiliating moment as a Leafs fan was at a playoff game in New Jersey last year. It was the game where they bowed out of the playoffs but it was more like they bombed-out. They were beaten soundly by a score of something like 3 or 4 to nothing. They did set a record though, for the least amount of shots (six) on net ever in a playoff game. Even more humiliating though, was having to sit in the stands, amongst the Devils' fans, wearing a Leafs shirt. At least the Leafs players weren't pelted with popcorn and beer, just the fans who paid $50 US a ticket. Still, even after all that, and even as much as it pains me to say this, no matter what they do in this year's playoffs, there is a chant that will likely live in my heart until the day I die: GO LEAFS GO!
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