Inside the dressing room, The Tragically Hip’s seminal 1991 record Road Apples blared from a speaker, only slowing for a song that sounds like a drunken stumble and lyrically, in many ways, epitomized this group: “Long Time Running.” Players mingled, chatting about the previous evening’s NBA playoff games.

Kerfoot insisted the team was upbeat after the Game 5 loss, and for moments on the morning of Game 6, you could argue they were. “We want to take it to them,” Alex Kerfoot said before Game 6. “So I think that just keeps things in house and keeps them collected in their thoughts.”īut it was the message that was shared that struck a different chord: with the Lightning now having some daylight and a chance to claw back into the series, the group recognized they needed more urgency. “In my time in this role, that’s the first time that’s ever happened when a team has always stayed together every night,” Keefe said of the team sticking together as a group for dinners ahead of every game on the road this series. T here was a feeling throughout the team that perhaps they would have a better chance to erase that number on the road, away from the noise that was creeping up in the city they call home. That double-digit number hung over the Leafs as they gathered for a team dinner at Meat Market, a steakhouse in Tampa’s upscale Hyde Park neighbourhood. After the Leafs had taken a 3-1 series lead, the visitors had stifled the Leafs in Toronto in Game 5, raising the total of elimination games this Leafs core had failed to win to 10. Late in the afternoon on Friday when the Leafs’ charter touched down in Tampa, the Lightning had the momentum in the series. These are the scenes of happiness on a day that changed the course of this Leafs core and, perhaps, the franchise.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe said. And, again, for the first time in nearly a generation, there was a strange feeling throughout the entire organization in the spring: happiness. But instead, he made it to the dressing room unharmed and bared his toothless grin for his friends to see.Īnd his grin wasn’t the only one inside a loud-ass Leafs room that, in these types of games for years now, would have been far quieter.īecause for the first time since 2004, the Leafs had exorcised their postseason demons with a win in the first round of the playoffs.

Bared to you series