Tim Leiweke, the sports executive, saw Wednesday as the dawning of a new era. David Miller, the sports fan and former Toronto mayor, saw it as the end of one.

In the wake of four-plus months of executive dismissals and internal unease since he took his post as president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Leiweke threw an employees-only celebration of his company’s future at the Air Canada Centre. He promised he was done hastening big-named exits like the ones inflicted on Bryan Colangelo and Tom Anselmi. He also repeated the vow he’s been spouting since he arrived in one of North America’s bleakest athletic landscapes: MLSE, long synonymous with amassing piles of money while losing reams of hockey, basketball and soccer games, will make it a primary mission to build victorious clubs to match its vats of lucre.

“We want to stop the spin and the B.S. and just say, ‘Let’s go win some things,’ ” Leiweke said in an interview.

Miller, who has heard such promises delivered before, spent part of Wednesday making a statement about what he sees as the perilous state of his beloved team. The longtime supporter of Toronto FC posted a letter to franchise owner MLSE on his Facebook page in which he lambasted the company for its recent history of organizational churn. He also blamed it for sucking the once-magical passion from BMO Field while criticizing Leiweke’s recent comments about the possibility of playing CFL football at the quaint soccer stadium — a move that opponents insist would necessitate the return of artificial turf in the wake of a much-heralded conversion to natural grass spearheaded in part by Miller in 2010.

As a statement of his conviction, Miller mailed the club his remaining stock of season tickets, of which he said he has purchased four a game annually since the club’s inception in 2007. He actually planned to be present at Wednesday night’s home game; he’d previously donated his tickets (section 227, face value $41.75 apiece) to a charity auction and made a promise to attend with the winning bidder.

“I (sent back the rest of the tickets) to make a very strong point to the senior management there that they’ve got a serious problem and they need to solve it,” Miller said in an interview. “If they don’t fix it now, it may not be fixable.”

Such is the reality of Leiweke’s existence. He’s a much-celebrated pro-sports rainmaker who previously ran AEG, a sporting behemoth that included in its stable the 2012 Stanley Cup champion L.A. Kings and two-time-defending Major League Soccer Cup champions L.A. Galaxy.

But for all his title-holding credentials and big-talking vision, he has arrived here to find a sporting populous in various states of jadedness. TFC, seven seasons into its existence, has yet to make the playoffs. The NBA Raptors haven’t been in the postseason in five seasons. The Maple Leafs, when they made a brief and heartbreaking appearance in the Stanley Cup tournament this past spring, were participating for the first time since 2004.

That’s not to say Wednesday didn’t bring the usual dose optimism at, say, the opening of Maple Leafs training camp, where Leiweke’s presence had been felt.

“He knows what he wants, and that’s to win,” Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf said of the CEO. “I’m looking forward to working for him.”

Raptors general manager Masai Ujiri, meanwhile, said the message Leiweke delivered to MLSE staff on Wednesday brought a jolt of adrenaline at an important moment.

“You can feel the energy in the air,” Ujiri said.

Still, it’s clear fans like Miller have grown tired of hearing well-delivered mission statements from the new guy in town.

“I hope (Leiweke is) successful. But from a TFC perspective, we heard this when they brought in Preki. We heard this when they brought in Aron Winter . . . We heard this when Paul Mariner took over. We heard this when Payne took over,” Miller said, listing off a partial roll call of TFC’s once-promising and since-departed soccer gurus. “Everybody, when they came in, had a great message. It’s the execution that’s lacking.”

Leiweke does have a reputation as a convincing sermonizer. On Wednesday, at an event dubbed MLSE Expo that was attended by the company’s employees and included addresses from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, Major League Soccer commissioner Don Garber and NBA deputy commission Adam Silver, Leiweke laid down his vision for making Toronto a championship-winning haven.

He spoke in an interview of the wisdom he gleaned from rubbing shoulders with the late Jerry Buss and Jerry West, patriarchs of the L.A. Lakers dynasty, and with friend Lou Lamoriello, architect of three Stanley Cup teams for the New Jersey Devils. Leiweke said he has tried to convey to his staff his strong belief in the importance of building a “winning culture.”

“I want them to understand that there is a formula on winning. This is not by luck,” Leiweke said. “We’ve got to be like New York and L.A., where we do not tolerate losing.”

How did MLSE react to losing a subscriber named Miller? The company invited him to meet with Leiweke via Twitter. Miller, though his Twitter handle @iamdavidmiller, appeared to decline the invitation. He said in an interview that he wasn’t advocating a boycott of the club, but that the supportive reactions he’d been receiving on social media and in the street — specifically King Street, where he interrupted a phone interview to accept a thank-you from a fellow TFC fan — told him there are many loyalists who feel the way he does.

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“We love the club. We love BMO Field. But it’s unbelievably frustrating that we’re starting all over again, again,” Miller said. “If (Leiweke) is the right guy and he can do it, great. But if he’s not, I don’t think they have another chance. This is their last chance from the perspective of hard-core, long-time supporters.”

Perhaps that’s not exactly how Leiweke envisioned his opening handful of months in his new job, barely arrived and already on his last chance in some minds. But Leiweke, who on Wednesday boasted of his bull-in-a-china-shop intensity, seemed more than aware of the urgency required to medicate a city full of fans who’ve known little but misery for too long. It’s true it’s only talk, and it’s also true that many fans will only believe another spiel about another “championship vision” in the moment before champagne is popped. But Leiweke can make a case that he’s the first MLSE executive to point out the profit-above-all problems of the past while he goes about trying to fix the damage they wrought.

“If you don’t acknowledge what’s wrong, I don’t know how the heck you fix it,” Leiweke said. “I’m also not afraid of saying, ‘Our standard is we’re going to win.’ And in order to win you have to aspire to win championships and trophies. We’ve always been afraid of that. We’ve always said, ‘No, don’t do that because it’s going to raise the expectations.’ Why are we doing this if it’s not for that? Why be in this business if you’re not trying to win championships? Stop hiding. Put it out there. Create the expectations. If we’re good, we’ll meet it.”

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