Two years ago, the Toronto Maple Leafs sat down with Steven Stamkos, but, by their own admission, blew it. “Within two minutes,” one member of the organization later said, “we knew we’d lost him.”

That presentation focused on “the hometown boy’s return” and “this is how you can make even more money by playing in Toronto.” It was, by all accounts, a total whiff. This time, they were determined to avoid the previous mistake. “The focus for us with John was only on hockey,” Dubas told the 31 Thoughts podcast last July. “That was the major thing that we wanted our focus to be…. ‘Here’s who we are as a hockey team,’ and ‘Here’s who we are as a program to help you reach your potential.’ ‘Here’s what we do on the development side.’

“If you rewind it [to] two years ago, we were going in and saying, ‘Here’s what we are going to become,’ and ‘Here’s what we intend to be,’ so it was trying to sell them on what we intended to be as an organization that had just finished in last place and picked first overall, versus now in 2018…. It was much easier…. To me, it has to be always about hockey. The periphery stuff that comes with playing in whatever market it is, that’s up to the player and his representative in terms of what he does and doesn’t want to do.”

Toronto pushed hard on the practical reasons for Tavares to come — the talent in the organization; the young core of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and William Nylander. But the Maple Leafs also pulled some emotional strings.

So far, the video shown to Tavares remains private. But Dubas says they didn’t show Tavares with the Maple Leafs winning the Stanley Cup or holding a parade.

“I just have a strong leniency to not tempting karma,” he says. “I think we just wanted to show John what it would be like if he was a Toronto Maple Leaf and that’s what we did. It’s nothing spectacular or special, I don’t think — just about the people he’s going to be here with…. I think it’s a very personal thing to John…. If there ever comes a day he wants to share what it was all about, I will leave that to him because it was a very personal presentation.”

We know they put the ice back in Scotiabank Arena and filmed Marner under theatre-style lighting, showing his tremendous skill.

“[Dubas and Babcock] wanted me to go on the ice for a quick little thing for an acquisition for the off-season,” Marner told David Amber in an interview as Toronto opened training camp. “You kind of get a feeling… of who it’s going to be for. Just did some things on the ice, nothing too crazy. The video I saw, it was pretty cool. It was really well done…. Just put him in that atmosphere of [being] a Toronto Maple Leaf before he was. I got shivers watching it.”

According to a couple of sources, the narration made it very clear to Tavares that with him, “We can be forever remembered in the city.” The Stanley Cup was there, but not held by any of the Maple Leafs.

And there was a Tavares banner in the rafters of Scotiabank Arena.