My guilty pleasure is a Friday afternoon full-equipment shinny game, for which my enthusiasm vastly exceeds my skill.

Many of the regulars are diehard Maple Leafs fans. Their hope (as well as their granular knowledge of all things Leaf) springs eternal. Personally, I abandoned all hope in the early 1990s, when the sun set on the Doug Gilmour era.

I admit I still side-eye the Leafs. But a few years ago, I also bought a Montreal Canadiens practice jersey in a silent gesture of protest to my fellow skaters, several of whom don the blue-and-white and ritually wax optimistic about the latest prospect who will invariably be ruined and then traded.

My agreement with myself is that I will someday retire my stinky Habs sweater, but the condition isn’t a halfway decent playoff run, nor a Stanley Cup win. Rather, I’m holding out for Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment to relinquish its competition-crushing veto on another NHL franchise in the Greater Toronto region.

With the one-two firings of Don Cherry and Mike Babcock this month, some Toronto fans may believe they’ll soon see the light of a new dawn. No more formulaic, 1990s-vintage coaching. No more prima donna indulgence. No more racist BS at intermission. Hockey in this town is moving on.

The problem, however, has nothing to do with the dramatis personae. Rather, I’d argue the true villain in the Leafs’ endless soap opera is structural: the glaring absence of true competition for the league’s most notorious loser. It’s a monopoly that screams to be broken up. Only from the shards will something better arise.

After the Leafs passed from the hands of Harold Ballard and then Steve Stavros into the gigantic portfolio of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, many critics complained that MLSE understood its primary duty was to generate steady and bloated profits to ensure the comfortable dotage of the province’s educators.

And so they did: MLSE merchandised, corporatized and commodified the product that is the Leafs, transforming this team into the most valuable NHL franchise — a feat akin to alchemy. Instead of pursuing victory, MLSE trained the city to care more about the brand and the gear than the game, then filled the stands with guys in suits who were out with clients and didn’t care about the outcome.

When Teachers exited (the fund sold its 80 per cent stake to Bell and Rogers in 2011 for $1.3 billion), some observers hoped the change in ownership would usher in a new and hungrier era. Which, of course, didn’t happen.

I’ll resist the temptation to dwell on the fact that both Bell and Rogers have vigorously defended themselves from open competition in their core businesses. Let’s focus instead on the question of permitting NHL rivalries within the GTHA.

While the NHL has two multiple team cities (Greater New York and Los Angeles), the Leafs have always opposed additional franchises in this region. The NHL went along, partly out of a fear that a second GTHA team would kill off the Buffalo Sabres, but mostly because Gary Bettman knows who sharpens his skates.

Consequently, the Leafs have delivered decades of mainly mediocre hockey because this team is like the cool crowd in high school, whose members never had to develop winning personalities because everyone wanted to hang out with them.

It’s worth acknowledging that MLSE owns two other North American professional sports franchises that haven’t sat on their laurels. So why doesn’t the monopoly argument apply to the Raptors or the Toronto FC?

The answer is simple: both teams had to fight Leaf Nation by building loyal fan bases and teams that wanted to succeed. They already had competition in their backyard, which meant they had to be hungry. It just so happened the owners who capitalized on all that hard slogging also profited by the Leafs’ cruise control.

There’s clearly room for a second franchise in a region with almost 7 million people. Indeed, if there was justice in the universe, Hamilton would have had an NHL team long ago. But one could work in Markham or Waterloo just as well.

If the NHL opened that door, the Leafs could no longer take all those corporate boxes and season ticket holders for granted. Within “Hockey Night in Canada’s” broadcast-shed, fans would have a choice, and the mere fact that a second option exists would quickly seep into every nook and cranny of the Leaf organization. Like the Raptors did last year, they’d actually have to play like they wanted to win, and not just games, but also the hearts and minds of GTHA residents.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

More than that, competition will also eventually make MLSE more profitable, counterintuitive as that sounds, because they would have to be selling a better product, as opposed to overpriced rotary phone service. That key insight underscores the paradox hovering over this mess: the Leafs’ staunch defence of its monopoly hasn’t been good for hockey, and it isn’t good for the business, either.

So my challenge to the Leafs’ owners is this: forsake exclusivity, and I will gladly turn in my now well-stained Habs jersey. It seems like a fair deal.