A few summers ago I went to see Steven Stamkos play beer-league baseball.

It was a humid August night on a dimly lit community field in Markham. There were three spectators in attendance. But Stamkos was performing as though he somehow owed a sellout stadium the price of a luxury box admission. When he wasn’t diving to catch a blooper he was hopping the fence to retrieve foul balls. When he wasn’t sprinting to the warning track to make a leaping catch, he was at the plate hitting a home run.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This was a guy, after all, who’d just signed a $37.5 million (U.S.) contract as captain of the Tampa Bay Lightning. But when I spoke to some of his teammates, many of whom were former classmates at Markham’s Brother Andre Catholic High School, they shrugged as though it was no big deal. The money and the fame hadn’t changed their old pal. He was born and raised in the GTA. He loved spending all the time he could here. And if you wanted more proof of his salt-of-the-earth bona fides, on the ball field he wore No. 17 in homage to a childhood hero named Wendel Clark.

“Some of us were pushing him to come to the Leafs,” one of his beer-league teammates told me then. “And he just laughs about it.”

We all laughed about it that night, the idea of Stamkos playing for Toronto. And there was a time when it seemed unthinkable. But times have changed. So let me get my grand pronouncement out of the way: I’m of the belief Stamkos, who’ll be playing for the Lightning at the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday night, will be playing for the Maple Leafs next season.

Let me also say this: I could be totally wrong. This is a gut-feeling call that flies in the face of plenty of respected NHL sources telling me there’s only a slim chance Stamkos ever plays for Toronto.

Still, it’s been about six months since Tampa Bay general manager Steve Yzerman announced it was his first priority to re-sign Stamkos, due to become an unrestricted free agent this summer. And since then, there’s been mostly silence. Bob McKenzie, the TSN hockey insider, recently described the Stamkos-Lightning talks as going “nowhere.”

Meanwhile, in possibly related circumstances, Stamkos is struggling through his worst season in a long time, and the Lightning are finding themselves hard-pressed to rediscover the form that took them to the Stanley Cup final a year ago. With the trade deadline looming Feb. 29, Stamkos holds a full no-movement clause. In other words, if Stamkos so chooses he can either dictate the details of a trade or arrive at free agency and sign wherever he likes.

And that’s where the Maple Leafs come in. It’s been a ho-hum season in the centre of the hockey universe. Leafland has rarely been so bereft of buzz.

Not that head coach Mike Babcock’s $50 million arrival hasn’t made a stark impact on the product. Babcock’s Leafs are playing a credible brand of defensively responsible hockey. But business on Bay Street is hardly booming. For the first time in 10 years the Leafs have fallen out of first in Forbes magazine’s annual rankings of NHL franchise values; they’re now ranked third. And the team’s television ratings, too, have plummeted. None of it can please an ownership group that includes Rogers, a corporation that didn’t spend $5.2 billion on national NHL rights to watch the marquee Canadian franchise devolve into afterthought.

There’s no cash cow in hockey like a must-watch Maple Leafs team. Babcock alone clearly isn’t captivating the masses.

What will? Well, wins. And star power. Stamkos could add both. And he wouldn’t be the kind of veteran the Leafs have historically acquired — a brand name grossly past his prime. Stamkos is still only 25 years old. Since he arrived in the league in 2008, only Alex Ovechkin has scored more goals. Gems like that don’t come on the market often.

Why would Tampa Bay let him go? They’re facing a salary-cap crunch, for one. And there’s an obvious disconnect between head coach Jon Cooper and his captain that only got more glaring this past post-season, when Cooper used Stamkos like Tampa’s fifth- or sixth-best forward at key moments.

That Tampa signed Cooper to a contract extension earlier this month was a clear signal: The coach isn’t going anywhere. Which is just one more reason Stamkos might be.

So whether or not you put any stock in Stamkos’ gift for creating social-media storms — twice he has favourited/liked tweets referencing his possible future as a Leaf, claiming honest mistakes in both instances — there’s more than enough circumstantial evidence to suggest he’ll need a moving truck come July.

Only Stamkos knows what Stamkos wants, of course. So why on earth would he want Toronto?

Let’s start with how the lure of going home can be a powerful thing; ask Zach Parise and LeBron James. It can be a massively lucrative one, too. But money and sentiment alone probably wouldn’t sway Stamkos to choose the team he cheered for as a kid.

Stamkos, anyone who knows him will tell you, has a single hockey dream that overrides every other concern: A Stanley Cup. So if the Leafs are embarking on a patient reconstruction project under president Brendan Shanahan, perhaps Stamkos would be too old by the time Toronto is ready to win one.

That argument only falls apart if the Leafs can convince Stamkos they are closer to contending for the prize than they appear. Babcock has proven again and again that he can work magic with a hard-working core and a small supply of top-end talent. This past spring, Babcock’s Detroit Red Wings pushed Stamkos’ skill-laden Lightning to the seventh game of a first-round series. Detroit, by many accounts, was Game 7’s better team — they outshot the Lightning 31-16 — even if Tampa was the winning one. So that’d be part of Babcock’s sales pitch to Stamkos: You saw what my team did to yours.

The Leafs could make the case that with Babcock at the helm, with Stamkos on board and an AHL-leading farm team full of prospects on the rise, they wouldn’t be that far away from making real noise. Add some backend upgrades and a proven starting goaltender and who knows where they could be in a year? In 19 games without the struggling Jonathan Bernier this season — and Bernier is slated to start Tuesday after a four-game “conditioning” stint in the AHL — Toronto has played at 104-point pace.

Maybe that’s a small sample size at the heart of a far-fetched sales pitch. But far-fetched sales pitches happen to be Shanahan’s specialty. The team president has proven gifted at selling his vision to unlikely customers. Few thought Babcock would land in Toronto, yet here he is. Nobody saw GM Lou Lamoriello coming. Shanahan brought him. Would Stamkos be immune to seeing himself cast as a blue and white messiah?

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Don’t get me wrong: I fully understand there are plenty of reasons to believe Stamkos will end up elsewhere. If it came down to a trade, maybe the Leafs would be squeamish about forfeiting futures. If it came to free agency, there’d be no end of suitors, and there’d also be the matter of negotiating a contract with Lamoriello, who has a reputation for low-balling. Even if Stamkos wanted to come to Toronto, in other words, history gives us every reason to believe the Leafs might find a way to make it impossible. Wayne Gretzky was keen to play for Toronto once upon a time, too, and the ownership of another era squandered the chance. (That era’s ownership, mind you, wasn’t as interested in boosting TV ratings as this one’s.)

Let’s be clear: Stamkos isn’t Gretzky, and Stamkos to Toronto isn’t some fait accompli. But as acquisitions go — on the ice, on the flat-screen, in the community — it’d be a great one.

Feel free to dismiss me as totally out in left field, but I just see it getting done.