[McIndoe,Athletic] Leafs are a mess and it’s hard to watch in more ways than one.

The Maple Leafs are spiralling. They’ve lost four in a row, they keep losing to bad teams, and they don’t look anything like the team that steamrolled through most of the 2021-22 regular season. Sunday night’s third-period collapse in Anaheim was a truly pathetic scene – a so-called Stanley Cup contender playing terrified hockey against the last-place team in the league. This is a team in crisis right now, and fixing it is going to be a very hard job.

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Luckily, it’s not your job to fix it. If you’re a Maple Leafs fan, your only job is to cheer them on. Keep the faith, believe in your team, and look forward to the next game.

That’s becoming a very hard job too.

I’m not the only one feeling that, right? I’m talking to the fans here, not the anti-Leafs weirdos who claim not to care about the team but still read pieces like this for some reason; we know you guys are enjoying all this. For the rest of us, not so much. If I can take off my impartial-media-guy disguise for a second and just be the Leaf fan that I’ve been for nearly four decades, some teams are easier to cheer on than others. The 1993-era team of Wendel Clark, Dougie Gilmour and Pat Burns will live forever, even if they never went all the way. The Pat Quinn-era teams were fantastic, with Mats Sundin and a rotating class of villains who drove other teams crazy. Even the early days of Brian Burke’s mess of a team were at least their own kind of fun, probably the last chance we’ll ever have to embrace a team that tried to beat them in the alleys. If you go back far enough, you might still have a place in your heart for the Sittler/McDonald/Palmateer era team that took out the Islanders.

This current Leafs team is the most talented one I’ve seen in my lifetime. It might not even be all that close. But are they fun to watch? Do you like cheering for this? Or are you just kind of tired of them?

I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to watching this team. I still do watch, and sometimes I don’t even end up regretting it. But these days, with this team and its history, it feels like a slog. It’s duty, or force of habit. The wins don’t matter and the losses all blend together, so what are we doing here?

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Brendan Shanahan arrived in 2014, and eventually started sweeping out the remnants of a front office that was dumb and proud of it, there was hope. When they successfully tanked their way to Auston Matthews, then debuted him alongside Mitch Marner and William Nylander, the pieces were falling into place. That was an easy team to root for, a collection of young talent that somehow made Mike Babcock hockey feel bearable. I even wrote my first piece on this site about that 2016-17 season, and how the combination of high ceiling and low expectations was so much fun to root for. But then I closed that column with a warning: “It’s all good. But it’s fleeting.”

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You know what came next. Six years of postseason failure. Six years of increasingly dominant regular season performances, all of which ended the same way. Six years that have seen team records and highlight reels and a Hart Trophy, but also endless collapses and punchlines and a Zamboni driver. And through it all, not a single signature moment that you’ll want to tell your grandkids about.

It’s one thing for a team to be bad. Lots of teams are, every year, and a fan can still find something to love about a bad team. Maybe it’s the kids and their promise of the future, or the grizzled veterans playing out the string, or some element of character. Maybe it’s just the fun of knowing that they’re bad enough that the occasional fluke win can ruin some other fan base’s whole week. You can find the fun in being bad. John Brophy taught us that.

This version of the Leafs isn’t a bad team. It’s a good team that looks bad. Awful, even, way too often. And scared and hesitant and lost. And then when the game’s over, they look confused and thin-skinned and pouty. The postgame media scrums are about the only time this team’s stars seem to want to get defensive.

And through it all, a big chunk of the fan base desperately casts around for someone to blame. Right now, that dial seems to have landed on Mitch Marner, after a pair of turnovers got him benched against the Ducks. Marner probably takes too much blame when things are going badly in Toronto. That’s unfair, but it’s also to be expected. It’s what he signed up for, just three years into his career, when he and the people around him decided he was a proven superstar and had to be paid like one. More young players should do what Marner did and squeeze their teams for every dollar, but it does come with expectations, especially in a market like Toronto. If Marner didn’t realize that then, I’m guessing he does now.

But he’s far from alone. It’s also Sheldon Keefe, giving yet another encore performance of his well-worn postgame speech about getting these guys to start on time and play a full 60, as if that isn’t his job. It’s Kyle Dubas, swearing his allegiance to the core over and over, refusing to so much as publicly consider a change. It’s John Tavares, the captain who’s still producing in year five of his megadeal but offering the same thousand-yard stare whenever things start to go off the rails in another third period. It’s Auston Matthews and Justin Holl and whoever the goalie is tonight, and Morgan Rielly, and that new guy on the fourth line with the hyphen in his name. No, the other one. It’s all of them.

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NHL teams love to bleat on and on about finding an identity. Fans tend to tune that out because, in today’s NHL, that identity is always the same: Defensive, detail-oriented, physical but not in the highlight-reel hit kind of way. Skate, forecheck hard, be boring, just like every other team is trying to be. When you hear anyone in this league start to ramble about identity, you tune out because it’s usually meaningless.

Say what you want about this Leafs team, they damn sure have an identity. Oh, it’s not the one they want, but they have it all the same, and they don’t seem to have much interest in shaking it. Their identity is failure. Not for lack of talent, but somehow in spite of it. A collection of stars who win at the bargaining table when it’s contract time but lose on the ice as soon as it matters.

How do you root for that? Do you even bother?

If you’re a real fan, you find a way. That will be the response from some of you, and I get it. I’ve never been able to summon that kind of raw love-it-or-leave-it optimism, for the Leafs or any other team in the various sports I watch, but I think I understand. It seems like it would be more fun than whatever this is, and if you’re proud to be the kind of fan who’ll never say a bad word about a team, then I’m not here to change your mind.

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But I don’t think I’m alone here. After one of the playoff collapses, it barely matters which one, I wrote about how the reaction I was seeing in the fan base felt different. I heard from a ton of you who said: Yep, that’s me. And I’m sure most of you felt that way for an offseason and then wound up right back where you always are because that’s what fans do. We survived Ballard and the Muskoka Five and It Was 4-1, we can handle a great team having a bad road trip in October. Maybe.

We at least know this much: It will get better. This Leafs team isn’t playing well, but they’ve also lost a few close games with a third-string goalie and some tough injuries and a 60-goal scorer in a slump that can’t last. They started badly last season too, and even though Mirtle has explained why this start has been significantly worse, it’s still true that last year’s team rebounded just fine. They’ll figure this out and get back on track, and at some point this season they’ll be running over teams again, and we’ll look back and laugh about how we all overreacted again. Classic Toronto, am I right? And then we’ll wait until the playoffs because we’ve all agreed that that’s all that matters for this team anyway.

And then they might win. It could happen. The talent is there, Keefe is a good coach, Dubas might find the midseason move that clicks, and the last few weeks will be forgotten. Finally, the coin will come up heads a few times when it matters, and this team will win a few rounds. Maybe they’ll win it all.

If that happens, it goes without saying, anyone who’s ever cheered for this team will pile back onto the bandwagon. We’ll tear down the statues of Sittler and Lanny and Keon and Wendel and build new ones for Marner and Matthews and hyphen guy and miscellaneous goalie. You’ll swear you never gave up hope, and you’ll send me links to this post with a note saying “this held up well.” That’s how it works sometimes. It could absolutely work in Toronto.

But until it does, we’ve got five more months of… this. Five more months of wins that don’t matter and losses that somehow do, of promises that next game will be different, of excuses about why it wasn’t, of trusting the process. Of being lectured about what kind of fan you’re supposed to be. Of shambles in our brains, whatever that means.

Can you, a loyal Maple Leafs fan, keep doing it? Trick question, you don’t have a choice. But if it feels like more of a slog than it’s been in a long time, well, just know that you’re not alone. Us lifers have been through it all, most of it worse than this, and now we’re stuck with this bunch. The most talented team of our lifetime, quick with an excuse but not with a backcheck, somehow closer to a Cup than we’ve ever seen them while feeling further away than they’ve ever been.

(Photo: Jason Parkhurst / USA Today)