Now that the Toronto Maple Leafs have made it official they’re a genuine threat to win the Stanley Cup, get ready. Leaf jokes will stop. Parade routes will be more acceptable. The ghosts of Cups past will surface.
May 2, 1967, will be re-visited, noting that was the year Canada turned 100, average house prices in Toronto were $24,000 and, to quote Foster Hewitt as he signed off his last National Hockey League broadcast: “The Toronto Maple Leafs have won the Stanley Cup!”
Toronto finished third in that final Original Six season, stunned first-place Chicago and second-place Montreal in six games, winning both 3-1. Just for fun, and to make Distant Replay more relevant, I turned the clock back to a game I do remember, but watching it more closely than I did 58 years ago this week.
At least 14 people remember it better, as survivors of the 36 players in uniform that night at Maple Leaf Gardens. Six were Leafs, eight were Montreal Canadiens and all are now in their 80s. Toronto was on top of the hockey world in a way it hasn’t been since, naturally, this being its 57th consecutive season without tasting Lord Stanley’s champagne.
However, imagine if telling those Leafs that captain George Armstrong would never see Toronto win the Cup again, even though he lived to be 90. Or that Terry Sawchuk, the goaltending marvel widely credited with winning both series, would be dead three years later. Or that Dave Keon, who won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs’ most valuable player, would — to this day — be the only Leafs’ player to win the award named after the man who named the team.
Keon (84), Frank Mahovlich (87), Bob Pulford (89), Mike Walton (80), Pete Stemkowski (81) and lightly-used Brian Conacher (83) are the former Leafs still available to watch their Cup-winning game. It’s logical at least some of them will re-visit it on Hockey Night in Canada… if and when. Theirs would surely be a different replays than mine.
What I saw this week was a much slower game than today’s, with less sophisticated camera work then and more world-class skaters now (and none suspected of having beer-league speed). The game was exciting and could have gone either way — I’m told Jean Beliveau, to his dying day, thought a save Sawchuk made on him with the score 1-0 was the difference.
This game had no scrums, no names on jerseys, one goalie mask (Sawchuk), two players wearing helmets (Bobby Rousseau, J.C. Tremblay), zero commercials and fewer total replays (called “playbacks”) than we currently see for one play. Also just one mention, late in the third period, that the Leafs could win the Cup, which NHL President Clarence Campbell later presented to “the Maple Leaf Hockey Club.”
Since 1967, Canadian teams will have collectively played 269 seasons without winning the Stanley Cup, with at least four more about to increase that total this month… five if no Canadian team wins. Only Toronto and Montreal have played in all-Canadian Cup finals, six of them, and that will never happen again.
That Stanley Cup in ’67 was Toronto’s fourth in six season, and look at what followed it.
