To celebrate the Maple Leafs centennial this season, the Toronto Star has compiled some of the best stories from our archives on the beloved franchise in the book 100 Years in Blue and White: A Century of Hockey in Toronto. Here’s an excerpt of columnist Jim Proudfoot’s story after the Leafs won the Cup, first published on April 27, 1964.

It will be remembered as the long season.

The 1963-64 Leafs engaged in 101 games and it’s a question who suffered the most, who’s the more exhausted today, now that it’s all over — Leafs or their harassed, frazzled supporters.

Bobby Baun has his leg in a cast and Red Kelly is in a wheelchair but the team’s followers are emotionally spent. An earthquake would make them yawn. The players will be ready for the new season next October but the fans may not make the grade.

Loving the Leafs this winter was synonymous with paranoia. A fan was delirious with joy one day, delirious with worry the next. Leafs had more ups and downs than the stock market. They leaped out of more frying pans into more fires than any club in history.

At the end, after seven months of setbacks and failures, they had their noses in front, like a classy racehorse. Confronted with one climactic match, in which they would win the Stanley Cup or lose it, they produced their finest hockey of the entire campaign and subdued Detroit Red Wings, 1–0.

The season’s largest hockey crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens, 14,571, acclaimed Leafs’ third successive title with a mighty ovation.

But there were hypocrites in the house.

Folks had been jumping off the Leaf bandwagon since mid-January when they began a 16-game stretch, during which they lost 10 times and scored only 28 goals.

Leafs frittered away the schedule championship they’d been expected to win.

Most of their established heroes were dismayingly unproductive.

The February trade that brought Andy Bathgate and Don McKenney to Toronto, followed by a mild resurgence, was considered an encouraging move.

However, Leafs embarked on the Cup playoffs as a 3-to-1 underdog and proceeded to justify that evaluation by losing three of the first five semifinal matches against Montreal Canadiens.

That was a stern test, even for the most faithful rooter.

Leafs escaped from that predicament, only to find themselves in even more dire straits two weeks later. Wings led them, 3–2 in games, as chapter-six of the final series began last Thursday.

Baun’s overtime bouncer won that one and set the stage for Saturday’s finale.

On this one vital occasion, Leafs were the hurrying, hurting champions they’d been a year ago and only infrequently this season.

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Something new crackled through the Gardens atmosphere right from the start, a sort of collective agreement among the players and their boosters, as if to say: “Okay, enough of this fooling around. Let’s get down to business.”

The cheering was several decibels louder than usual and Leafs’ efficiency was on a higher level, too.

The determination was as tangible in the arena as it had been in Leafs’ dressing room before faceoff time.

“I’ve never seen the team more worked up,” said George Armstrong, captain of all three Cup squads.

“There’s only one explanation,” Armstrong added, “and the best word I can think of is ‘heart.’

“Think of what Kelly and Baun went through, playing with those injuries,” said Armstrong who himself had received injections to deaden the pain of a damaged shoulder.

“Look at Johnny Bower. How else can you account for him? Hell, he gets tuckered out when we go for a walk in the afternoon. But look at the way he’s played.

“And with guys like that coming through, the others have an example to live up to and they dig in and work.

“Listen,” Armstrong said, “our jobs were right on the line. We knew that. We had a lousy year, a lot of us. The team did and we’re all part of it. If we blew this, we knew darned well there’d be changes next fall. And we knew who’d get the chop — the old guys.

“There was a lot more than the Stanley Cup at stake tonight. It was our jobs and our pride we were fighting for.”