The Maple Leafs, if you missed it, blew another third-period lead in Tuesday’s shootout loss to the Sharks. And in a different Maple Leafs season, at a time when the fan base lived and died with the result of every game, it might have been enough to send the hard-core loyalists over the edge and into a sports radio frenzy.

But unqualified sunshine is the preferred mood of the moment in the still-under-renovation Leafs Nation. Most fans, currently happy with the franchise’s general direction and uninterested in nitpicking, seemed okay with giving the lads their Shootout Participant ribbons on Tuesday and dreaming of better odds at the draft lottery. Even Mike Babcock, the victory-obsessed head coach who still has a hard eye on the playoffs, was upbeat in his post-game comments: “We did a lot of good things,” and so on.

A day later Babcock said he considered working on the shootout in Wednesday’s practice — the Leafs, after all, are 0-for-4 in the skills competition this season — but reconsidered.

“We thought that would be a negative thing today,” Babcock said.

That’s not to say the coach doesn’t understand the necessity of an occasional shootout point to a team that came into Wednesday six points out of a playoff spot. But the Leafs are currently prioritizing positivity over everything — even pressing matters of improvement. And really, it makes sense. Yes, the Leafs were a point out of last place in the 16-team Eastern Conference. But there are, really, many things to be positive about.

And here’s a big one. Twenty-eight games into the season, the Maple Leafs have possessed a second-intermission lead 16 times. As of Wednesday, no NHL team had led more games through two periods. In other words, in the After 40 Minutes standings — which, granted, don’t actually exist — Toronto is currently in first place.

Here’s another thing to be upbeat about: In a league in which scoring is at dead puck era lows, the third-period lockdown isn’t a very hard thing to master. As of Wednesday, a handful of teams — the likes of Chicago and Anaheim and Boston and Pittsburgh — were converting second-intermission leads into two points at a rate of 100 per cent this season. More than half the league was converting at no less than 85 per cent.

The Leafs ranked 29th at 63 per cent. If they were even a mid-pack squad in the category they’d have about four more points in the standings.

Still, looking on the bright side, their proven ability to build leads is one of the best ways to measure the year-over-year improvement that’s come with the spectacular class of rookies fronted by Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner et al. Last season, the Leafs led 22 games through two periods. This year they’re on pace to lead 46.

Getting ahead is the hard part. Improving on staying there ought to be doable. Some of it comes down to personnel (and clearly Toronto remains open to acquiring more talent on the blue line). But some of it, in Babcock’s assessment, is mental.

“It’s like anything in life. If you do something and it doesn’t go very good, then the next time you go, you have momentary doubt. Well, push through it. Suck it up,” Babcock said. “Tight and tentative never got you anywhere in life. When you get in your car . . . you don’t put one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. The long skinny one on the right, you just push it down. The car goes better.”

To put it another way: Babcock wants his team to keep attacking. Ditto Frederik Andersen, the goaltender who spent last season playing for the Anaheim Ducks, they of the 86 per cent lockdown rate with a third-period lead.

“You can’t sit back for 20 minutes in this league, because it’s going to cost you,” Andersen said.

How urgently that message is being implemented is anyone’s guess. There’s so much talk about how this season is a “process” that there are those who don’t appear to be using wins and losses to measure progress. And maybe rightly so. Perhaps taking the coach’s lead, Nazem Kadri, the veteran centreman, pronounced Tuesday’s loss “a pretty good game,” as if the third-period hiccups are to be expected.

“It’s still kind of early in the season. If it were to happen, we’d prefer it happen now and not later,” Kadri said Wednesday. “But as the season goes on it’s going to become unacceptable for that to happen. Because those points are going to become that much more important. But as of right now, because it’s still early-ish, before all-star break, before Christmas, so we can tolerate it a little more.”

That’s realistic and understandable. Still, as veteran defenceman Morgan Rielly was saying, “at some point you have to decide that the only thing that really matters is winning the game.”

Even the rookies aren’t totally tapping into the A-for-effort vein.

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“I don’t think ‘Good job, good try’ is sufficient here,” said Connor Brown.

Added Andersen: “It’s never good enough if you lose a third-period lead. It’s something you should be expecting to get a win out of every day.”

That’s the kind of positivity a fan base can warm up to: Hardly delusional, not yet satisfied, but showing signs worthy of excitement.

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