For an idea of the way Mike Babcock sees this Maple Leafs season, think for a minute about the way he framed last weekend’s defeat in Montreal.

There was no shame in Toronto’s 2-1 loss in Montreal. You fail to score more than one goal against Carey Price and you join a long line. That’s what Price does to even the best of the best. It’s the natural order of the hockey world.

But Babcock wasn’t content tipping a cap to his Team Canada No. 1 and leaving La Belle Province with a good-try smile.

The coach repeatedly insisted the Maple Leafs could have done more, needed to do more. Montreal, after all, had played the night before on the road. Toronto had been idle. If the Maple Leafs see themselves as a serious NHL team — and there’s no “if” in Babcock’s version of this sentence — they need to pounce on such scheduling edges.

“I expected us to come here and win,” he said. “We can play better, and we have to play better. I just think there’s more to give.”

The head coach who arrived in Toronto 18 months ago predicting imminent “pain,” in case you haven’t noticed, has since moved on to defining the state of the franchise with far more appealing P-words. Lately he’s been talking about the importance of staying in the playoff hunt. He’s also been demanding progress, pronto.

So count Saturday night’s 4-2 win over the Capitals as prompt-ish delivery on the head coach’s Montreal demands. With Washington in town on the second end of back-to-back games, the Maple Leafs, who’d last played Wednesday, utterly dominated their road-weary opponent from the get-go. It almost seemed symbolic that an early out-of-play puck opened up a gash in the considerable forehead of Capitals coach Barry Trotz.

The Leafs looked like a team out for blood. And for a lot of Saturday they played out of their minds. There were Globetrotters-esque moments, to be sure. Mitch Marner threaded a magical pass through traffic to set up Matt Martin for a pretty breakaway goal. James van Riemsdyk turned a hockey stick into a sand wedge, scoring on a flop shot from close range over a lunging Braden Holtby.

Auston Matthews built his first multiple-game goal streak with a bang-bang rebound blast; that’s three goals in two games in the wake of a 13-game goose egg.

And Nazem Kadri opened up Holtby’s five-hole with a world-class deke in answer to the early third-period goal by Washington that made it 3-1.

But those highlights were underpinned by consistent 200-foot discipline. A game after the Leafs somehow turned a 3-0 lead in New Jersey into a 5-4 shootout loss — the fifth time this year they’d seen a third-period lead dissolve into something less than two points — the Leafs weathered a late visiting surge to lock this one down. It helped greatly that the top defensive pair of Morgan Rielly and Nikita Zaitsev, coming off a dismal effort in New Jersey, played a smart, aggressive game that drew big praise from the coach.

“That’s just maturation,” Kadri said of the win. “We were keeping the pressure on instead of receiving it all the time.”

Said van Riemsdyk, distilling Babcock’s message to the group: “It’s healthy to challenge ourselves as a team, just because we know where we want to go. We can’t accept just okay.”

As Babcock warned before the game, the Leafs can’t expect to win consistently as chance-trading gamblers, not given the gradual tightening of defensive screws that comes with every NHL season.

“Off the start, the league is loose. It’s gotten tighter already,” Babcock said.

He’s not kidding. It’s been about a week since the early-season dream of an NHL scoring bump was officially put to bed. Last Sunday saw this year’s goals-per-game average dip below last year’s final number. Teams are combining for about 5.3 goals a night — same as it ever was in this dead-puck era.

“This thing about getting six a night and then you’re going to win like that — it’s not going to happen,” Babcock said. “You’ve got to learn to play well without the puck, and you’ve got to learn to play heavy in the offensive zone and spend time there, or you’re spending too much time in your own zone.”

On Saturday, in their 21st game of the year, the Leafs seemed to mostly get that message. It was a small bit of proof that there’s every reason to believe they can improve on some of the weaknesses that held them back in their opening 20 outings.

Third-period leads, for instance, aren’t supposed to evaporate in this league. Heading into Saturday there were seven teams that had turned 100 per cent of second-intermission advantages into two points. The Leafs, who came into Saturday’s final frame leading 2-0, are now eight for 13 on such conversions. That’s 62 per cent and possibly climbing.

“You just can’t turn pucks over when you’re trying to salt the game away,” Babcock said. “It’s a process and you’ve got to get used to doing it. Once you get used to doing it, it’s just automatic.”

That’s what’s been both frustrating and enlivening to a detail guy like Babcock. While these Leafs are dropping jaws doing hard, hard things — things like ranking third in goals per game, up from third-worst last season — they’re sometimes falling on their faces on the more teachable stuff like avoiding untimely turnovers with gaping leads.

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Still, nobody was going to teach last season’s Leafs to score. Babcock likes his chances of teaching this year’s Leafs to do things like pounce on a tired foe and protect a lead.

A week ago in Montreal Babcock put it this way: “You set expectations for yourself in life. And if you set high expectations you have a chance to reach them. If you don’t, you settle for second best.”

A week later, the Leafs didn’t settle for anything but a clinical two points. Now the challenge is to repeat the trick as the vise tightens and the grind rolls on.

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