Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

I don't know if it was nostalgia, some form of rekindled interest or the desire for a change of pace, but I genuinely found myself looking forward to the much heralded home opener of the Toronto Maple Leafs last Wednesday night.

I have freely stated in the past that I have become cynical over the years when if comes to professional sports. But memories of "what was" when I was a kid will, I guess, never completely go away.

Since I was a typical Canadian boy, the advent of autumn was bad news because school started again. But there was also the good news that the hockey season was about to start again too. That was enough of a positive to offset the dirtiest look that any teacher could have mustered.

Saturday nights were really something to look forward too, and this was at a time when folks in this

part of the world never got to see the start of the game. In the good old days, when the Leafs winning their fair share of Stanley Cups, the home games started at 8 p.m., but the TV coverage didn't start until 8:30. Do you remember killing time waiting for the voice of Bill Hewitt by watching Jackie Gleason do his Joe the Bartender routine opposite Frank Fontaine's Crazy Guggenheim?

Those were important days for a kid. In fact, it scares me a bit to think that it's been almost four decades since the Leafs last won the hardware, and it angers me a bit more to think there have been some many Toronto area kids who have not had that thrill. I well remember the night in 1967, when the Leafs won a cup that they really weren't supposed to take, watching the game with my mother and brother (Dad was out of town on a business trip). I remember the Leafs were ahead for a lot of the game, but it looked like the Habs could close the gap, and that worried at least three fans (no prizes for guessing who). I recall puzzling at why a defenceman, namely Allan Stanley, took the crucial, late-game faceoff deep in the Leafs' zone. I have vivid memories of the fans counting down the final seconds of the match (the first time I recall hearing that now commonplace sound from the crowd). And I remember my mother bawling out my brother when he started jumping for joy at the final bell.

Every kid in this part of the world deserves a night like that.

So it was with the appropriate amount of satisfaction that I took in the opening ceremonies last Wednesday.

Actually, I had been listing to the radio throughout the day, and that seemed to be what most people were talking about on the air. The topic even came up in my office a couple of times. Anyone with their ear tuned was reminded how long it's been since George Armstrong last hoisted the cup, and the prospects for this year (hopeful, but not realistically promising).

I arrived home, and my wife and I kicked around what we would do with the evening. After a couple of minutes of this verbal irrelevancy,

it came out that we were both really interested in watching the Leafs.

It's nice we don't have to wait through Jackie Gleason any more (with all due respect to The Great One).

It was wonderful to see some of the great names from the past being honoured, although any true Leaf fan knows the likes of Hap Day, Red Kelly and Borje Salming are honoured in perpetuity in a lot of hearts.

It was also nice to see some of the faces in the crowd. The camera zoomed in on one man, and I think it was Bob Baun (I stand to be corrected by any fan more knowledgeable than I in such matters).

Hap Day was several years before my time, but such was not the case with Kelly. In fact, he was my favourite Leaf for a lot of years. It really had nothing to do with his hockey skills, which he did have in abundance. In those days, before the popularity of colour TV, he was the only Leaf to wear a helmet, so he was easy for little eyes to spot in black-and-white. Typical little boy thoughts that I think few adults are willing to own up to ever having had.

Then there was Salming, who I think showed a lot more class than he was ever credited with in his playing

days. Perhaps ordinary people like you and me expect too much from our heroes, forgetting that a guy like Salming was retained to help win hockey games, not be PR practitioners. He received a lot of hammering in his playing days that I just thought he never deserved. It was nice to see him recognized one more time.

I've sort of been watching the game while I type these words at the kitchen table. It's early in the second period, and the Leafs are down by one. That's really nothing to worry about, at least at this stage. The season is only about 30 minutes old, with a lot more games and scoring chance to come, along with plenty of pithy observations from know-it-alls like me. Many of us will follow the team in the months to come, weighing their chances of making the playoffs and agonizing through the ordeal if they do get in.

And aspiring seniors like me will harken back 40 years and dream of seeing just one more Stanley Cup victory parade through the streets of Toronto, while a lot more 30-somethings and those who are younger will dream of seeing just one.

I sometimes forget how lucky I've been to see such parades as many times as I have.