No. 95: THE CORE FOUR / The not so young Leafs. At some point you have to move on. Maybe you've reached that point. Maybe you've already passed it.

It was only one game, but if the home crowd boos you off the ice 20 minutes into the playoff run, take it as a sign that the fans' patience is exhausted and the great experiment failed.

For a good twenty years, I’ve focused almost entirely on feature writing rather than beat reporting. Not to say that I didn’t write gamers or the like—in that time I worked ten or so world junior tournaments and would be writing off games daily, often twice daily. Those, however, qualify as event coverage. And I’d also drop in when the Maple Leafs were in the playoffs or work the Stanley Cup final. The last time I was up in the press box on a nightly basis and out at practices as a routine goes back to the 2016-17 season, when I followed the Leafs. A lot of the time I was filing stuff for Sportsnet and all of the time I was gathering material for a book, Young Leafs, which was published by Simon & Schuster the next fall.