It was about six months ago I first learned that John Tavares was signing in Toronto. I learned it from a gent named Cameron, a fella who frequents my local pub who spends sizeable portions of his time in the comment sections of HockeyBuzz.com, an area of the web that hosts all the best “what if my favourite team just traded our bad players for that team’s star?” proposals. I apologize for not reporting the information sooner, but I wasn’t able to verify the information independently. And yes, I promised him that, if in fact that turned out to be true, I would mention him in the first paragraph of the first article I wrote the day after it happened.



Needless to say, I did not anticipate ever writing the above paragraph.



There aren’t many times I encourage discussing hockey news with a dramatic tone, but it’s tough to overstate just how devastating this news is for diehard fans in Long Island, and how huge it is for those in Toronto.