Article content continued

Sure, you’d like to see more goals, but the hockey, for the most part, has been exceptional. The next trick is to keep the game there for the next two months, but that’s always been the NHL’s problem.

— On a related note, one of my real joys as a sports fan has been watching a downtrodden franchise finally assemble the pieces of a good young team and chart its raise to a championship contender. In hockey, we saw it with the Islanders in the late 1970s, the Oilers in the early ’80s, Pittsburgh a little later, Chicago in the mid-aughts and now it looks like it could be happening to the Leafs.

This is a conflicting development for much of Canada, which has a default setting to detest anything that comes out of Toronto. You can also guess the rest of the country will retch at the fawning, lovesick coverage that will come out of The Big Smoke if the Leafs should knock off the Caps in the first round.

But that’s our national psychosis. If you remove the Toronto element from the equation, there is so much to like about this Leafs team and the way they play. In a game that favours the safe and mundane, they feature a fast, dynamic style that might be high-risk, high-reward, but it’s a lot of fun to watch.

As they mature, it could be that exuberance will be coached out of the Leafs but, at this stage of their development, they’re young and fearless, and worthy of our admiration.

Besides, it looks like the Blue Jays suck again, so there’s that.

Photo by John Locher / AP

— The CFL is suddenly looking for its third commissioner in less than three years, so here’s some friendly advice. Offer the job to Duane Forde and hope like hell he accepts it.