Only 96 seats for the first Maple Leafs home playoff game were ever put on sale to the general public through the box office, a Star/CBC investigation has found.

That’s only one half of one per cent of the 17,929 seats in the Air Canada Centre for Game 3 next Monday against the Boston Bruins.

For decades it’s been very difficult to get a Leafs ticket. This season, the team’s young talent has produced a highly anticipated playoff run, stirring up passions in this hockey-mad city and driving demand even higher.

So the Star and the CBC decided to figure out exactly how hard it is to get a ticket to a Leafs playoff game.

Like many stadiums, the majority of the seats in the ACC are held by season ticket holders. For the Leafs, that number is 90 per cent, according to team owner MLSE. Additional tickets are held back for players’ families and staff.

That doesn’t leave many face-value tickets for the rest of Leafs fans.

At playoff time, regular season ticket holders are given the option to purchase their seats through the playoffs. Then they have access to special pre-sales for additional playoff tickets.

Only 672 tickets were put on sale for Game 3 against the Bruins during two pre-sales on Monday and the public sale on Tuesday. After the season ticket holders got first dibs, 209 tickets remained for members of Leafs Nation. On Tuesday, only 96 tickets were left for the general public.

“We have worked to create additional access for fans by giving away 200 free tickets per game through the Ford Fan Deck and contests as well as one of the best fan viewing experiences in the league with Maple Leaf Square,” MLSE spokesperson Dave Haggith wrote in an email.

But for many Leafs fans, Tuesday’s general public sale only brought disappointment. They expressed their dismay on Twitter.

“@TicketmasterCA you friggin suck. I hate that I can never, and i mean never ever get through to (buy) online tickets,” wrote Twitter user @salcamaro. “Just spent 25 minutes ‘spinning’ around hoping to get #leafs tickets and ... nothing.”

“Is anybody else not finding any Leafs playoff tickets to buy??” wrote @torontoleafer.

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Other than two pairs up in the rafters, all of the tickets made available to the general public on Tuesday were singles. Most were scattered throughout the lower bowl. They ranged in price from $175 to $754, with the average price being $506.77.

There were a few good tickets in the box office: A 7th-row seat in the corner; a 12th-row seat beside the net and a 14th-row seat right over a face-off circle. All three had a face value of more than $740.

Of course, if you’re willing to pay more, you can still get in. There are hundreds of tickets available on scalping websites, some priced at more than $2,000.

Before tickets even went on sale to the public, the online scalping market was already in full swing. On Monday morning, more than 1,000 tickets were available for the playoff game on ticket resale sites like StubHub, SeatGeek and Ticket Partners.

Erica Hind, a life-long Leafs fan from Waterloo, goes to two or three games a year and always buys her tickets from the box office, because going through scalpers “is highway robbery.”

She was able to secure a pair of tickets through Ticketmaster during Monday’s Leafs Nation pre-sale, but when she saw where they were and the price, she didn’t buy them.

“Eight hundred dollars for a pair of tickets with an obstructed view? No thanks,” she said.

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But the disappointment rankled.

“This is a huge year for the Leafs. The real fans want to go and the real fans can’t go because they’re all corporate seats,” Hind said. “And the further they get into the playoffs, the worse it’s going to get.”

Tony Knopp, the founder and CEO of TicketManager, a ticket tracking company, says making tickets available to regular fans is a “conundrum” for professional sports teams.

“When teams get good, tickets get harder to get. But teams can’t mortgage their future for profits today. They can’t charge every single penny today because there’s another generation of fans that needs to have a connection to the team.”

The problem is that teams are trying to do this with low-demand events, Knopp said, by offering $20 tickets to Tuesday night games against bad opponents.

“That’s not when you form super fans. You form super fans by getting a kid, or a family that maybe can’t afford it, to have the experience of playoff hockey. You take a 12-year-old kid to playoff hockey in Toronto, and you’ve got a fan for life,” he said.

“Teams have this really tough decision to make where they have to forgo revenues in those circumstances to create an environment where kids can buy those tickets and experience it themselves ... and there’s no way in the door for them if there’s only 96 tickets available.”

MLSE has held back some more tickets for fans. The company announced that a limited number of playoff tickets will be made available Wednesday to fans who get a code via a free membership with Leafs Nation.

“People are encouraged to get online with the Leafs Nation ticket code,” Haggith said, adding that fans who show up to watch the game in Maple Leaf Square can also win tickets.

The only solution for Leafs fans could be employing a tactic Hind used back in 2002, when the Leafs met the Carolina Hurricanes in the playoffs. Hind drove down to Raleigh, N.C., with two friends.

“Gas, ticket and hotel for two nights was cheaper than one ticket in Toronto,” she said. “And I sat with fans, not guys in suits who miss half the game. Sometimes I hate this hockey market!”

Data collection and analysis by the CBC’s William Wolfe-Wylie and Valérie Ouellet.

Marco Chown Oved can be reached at moved@thestar.ca