If you need proof history might possibly be repeating itself in Leafland, get a library card and a decent internet connection. Log on to the Star’s free archive. Place yourself in late February of 1981, the latest in a four-part series. The title: “City of Losers . . . Why Toronto’s Teams Aren’t Winning At Sports.”

Then, as now, the finger points at Randy Carlyle.

Now, of course, Leafs Nation is in disbelieving spasms that the brain trust would find it acceptable to re-up Carlyle as head coach despite the obvious downturn in his measurable results. He’s a Stanley Cup winner, yes. But since that 2007 triumph in Anaheim, Carlyle has been at the helm of precisely one victory in a playoff series. He’s also been the victim of one firing and two Toronto meltdowns. More to the point, despite his alleged reputation as a defensive guru, his teams have been among the bottom six in NHL shots-on-goal differential in each of the past five seasons. Brian Burke hired Carlyle to coach defence? The past two seasons in Toronto, Carlyle’s goaltenders have been pelted with rubber as if by biblical plague.

And there’s more: If you know anything about the Leafs dressing room, you know the head coach is neither widely liked nor highly respected. And you know that’s especially true when it comes to the most frequent targets of his profane abuse, specifically Nazem Kadri and Jake Gardiner.

You also know that it’s not by coincidence that Kadri and Gardiner are among the chief wares being shopped in the trade market. In an off-season in which the Leafs are promising change — in an off-season in which free agency and the draft don’t offer big pop — swapping pieces is about all that’s left.

Still, experience suggests there should be further examination of the historical archive before the trigger gets pulled. Both Kadri and Gardiner, after all, are 23 years old. For all their faults, and they both are possessed of many, they also happen to stand as two of the most gifted pieces in an oh-so-shallow Toronto talent pool.

All season long Dave Nonis, the Leafs GM, stood by two mantras. One seemed to be a bizarre ode to loyalty over reality: It’s not the head coach’s fault. The other was a vow not to repeat the sins of a laughingstock past: The Leafs will not, Nonis insisted repeatedly, trade away youth for quick relief.

The franchise’s roll call of such moves is long and lamentable. Recent examples include the pre-prime abandoning of Alex Steen and Tuukka Rask, both of whom bloomed into foundational players elsewhere. But an even earlier variation on the theme, coincidentally, included Carlyle as a central character. More than 30 years ago he was a symbol of the Leafs’ folly for a wholly different reason.

Why wasn’t Toronto’s circa-1981 hockey team winning at sports? In part it was because, only a few years earlier, they’d traded a 22-year-old defenceman named Carlyle to the Pittsburgh Penguins in search of size and toughness and a quality that today might be referred to as “compete level.” Never mind that Carlyle had been a 30th-overall draft pick by the Leafs thanks to his offensive gifts. Never mind that, in his third season since being traded away from Toronto, Carlyle would be adjudged the best defenceman in the NHL — this while the defensive-minded fruits of the multi-player trade with the Penguins, most notably Dave Burrows, didn’t pan out.

The Leafs, in another example of their historic impatience, were of the mind that they couldn’t wait around for Carlyle to turn into the player they hoped he’d become. Funny enough, one of the rationales for trading Carlyle was the presence in the system of an up-and-coming blue-liner named Ron Wilson. It was only the first of a handful of times that misplaced faith in Wilson would stymie the franchise.

Carlyle, as a player, couldn’t understand the club’s lack of belief in his skill set.

“I never quite understood what happened here,” Carlyle told the Star in 1981, his Norris Trophy campaign. “(It) didn’t make sense they would give up on me so quickly.”

The great Toronto columnist Milt Dunnell summed up the Carlyle deal from the Leafs’ perspective around that time. “One of their dumbest moves” is what Dunnell called it. It still stands as such, not that there isn’t potential for dumber in the offing, and not that Carlyle expressed post-trade affection for Hogtown.

“The thing I don’t miss about Toronto is the controversy,” Carlyle told the Star’s Wayne Parrish in 1981. “There was always so much pressure. In Pittsburgh there’s no pressure at all. Only what you put on yourself.”

Here we are, some 33 years on, and so much remains the same. The Leafs still aren’t winning at sports, even if they’re undisputed champions at simultaneously complaining about the market’s incessant crush while emptying its overflowing cashbox. They’ve missed the playoffs in eight of the past nine seasons in a league in which more than half the teams are gifted a post-season berth. They’re improbably bad. It’s quite probable, the team’s brain trust tells us, they’re about to get worse.

And now, because of their inherent inability to draft and develop talent in a league in which drafting and developing is king, it’s also quite probable they’ll package one or more of their best young players in an impending deal. Gardiner is no perfect player. He skates like the wind, yes. He’s among the best few Leafs at driving puck possession, for sure. But he’s prone to mental hiccups that, no matter if he’s 23 or 33 or 43, may never be snipped from his game. Most of the same can be said about Kadri. But to newly inserted president Brendan Shanahan, Gardiner and Kadri are among a scarce few trade chips that can deliver on the franchise’s promise for impending change.

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Players before Carlyle and after him have never quite understood what happens here. It didn’t make sense to a 22-year-old Carlyle why the Leafs gave up on his upside. It doesn’t make sense to a 23-year-old Gardiner why a coach would publicly eviscerate him for the sin of self confidence, as Carlyle did at last month’s post-mortem press conference.

But that’s the cycle here in Hogtown, and maybe it’ll forever repeat. Shanahan blew his introductory dose of public goodwill by failing to show his face and explain the still-hard-to-explain extension of Carlyle’s unpopular reign. Now, as the promise of change beckons while the mistakes of history echo, anyone familiar with Leafland’s storyline will tell you it must be time for someone in a suit to make a move that confounds the ages.

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