There were '4-1' jokes being made on Saturday, but only in the context of how far removed the butt of them are. If there was laughter, it came as comic relief.
The Toronto Maple Leafs defeated the Boston Bruins at TD Garden Saturday night, yes, by the score of 4-1, the same lead Toronto coughed up in Game 7 of their 2013 first-round series against the same Bruins team in the same building.
In ancient Greek mythology, the phoenix rises from the ashes, but first has to be incinerated. Much like the bird, the Maple Leafs too needed to be burned some four years ago — they needed to experience their ultimate death and demise before they could be reborn. On Saturday, with five skaters in the lineup who were part of that Game 7 collapse four seasons ago, Toronto showed how far it has come as a franchise in the time since.
Without its best player Auston Matthews, out for the third straight game with an upper-body injury, Toronto collected its third straight win. On Saturday, four different Maple Leafs scored, the winner by James van Riemsdyk, one of the holdovers from the Maple Leafs team that was Toronto's last bastion of success before it truly entered a rebuild.
A flawed Maple Leafs team made the 2013 Stanley Cup Playoffs after a lockout-shortened 48-game season. If that success proved anything, it was that small samples can be misleading and misrepresentative of the broader picture. An aging Maple Leafs roster lacked skill was going nowhere, and a playoff appearance in a shortened schedule, or even a first round victory against the Bruins wasn't going to change that.
And then, Toronto collapsed in spectacular fashion, blowing a 3-1 series lead, and a 4-1 third period lead on the road in Game 7. Toronto wasn't just eliminated, but crushed, its own heart ripped out before its very eyes, held for an extra moment to get a good look at the organ, and then pulverized. It was the kind of ending that could actually produce meaningful change, and if a few pieces of snow had been shaken off the branches, it was only the first movement of a greater avalanche.
Nothing looked dire the next season, in which Toronto finished with 84 points. But the following two years the Maple Leafs accumulated 68 and 69 points respectively, positioning them to acquire the talent the 2013 roster lacked, young pieces like Matthews, Mitch Marner, and William Nylander who can lead the franchise for the coming years.
On Saturday, Marner opened the scoring, jumping a passing lane in the Bruins end and with the same speed, snapping the puck off his stick and under the crossbar for a 1-0 Leafs lead.
van Riemsdyk scored less than five minutes later on the power play. He had two assists in that Game 7 four years ago.
Though the Bruins pressed and controlled play on Saturday, chasing a one-goal deficit for most of the game, Marner and van Riemsdyk combined to set up a Morgan Rielly tally 6:52 into the third period to give Toronto a two-goal cushion. When Patrick Marleau scored with 107 seconds remaining in regulation to make it 4-1, the game was iced, the jokes were rehashed, but the tone was one one of retrospective relief.
That moment in Leafs history will never be a pleasant one, but enough time has passed, enough progress has been made that it's a moment on Toronto's timeline that has since been preceded by better memories, with the Maple Leafs looking like they have plenty more to forge.
It's difficult to say that collapse in 2013 directly triggered the failures Toronto experienced in the years after, and the rebuild that has gutted the organization and molded it into a successful one. (That five players remain from a roster of four seasons ago is somewhat remarkable.) But in that moment, the Maple Leafs perhaps learned what they didn't have: a contending group. In the NHL, if you're not at the top, sometimes you need to be completely stripped down before you can get to the top. It happened in Toronto, and that happened in part because the Maple Leafs failed in the most time-to-look-in-the-mirror fashion.
On Saturday, they returned to their resting place a reborn and re-energized group, their missteps and failures seeming like a narrative of the past.