Opinion | The Maple Leafs rediscover their identity in Game 2, and a fan base exhales

It took one play to change the Toronto Maple Leafs’ season, one play to start. Hockey lore is full of that idea: We need a fight here boys, a big hit, a puck that bounces in. Before this game Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper was talking about momentum like it was a pendulum: When it swings your way, you just try to keep pushing it in the same direction for as long as you can.

The Leafs shoved on their first shift. They pushed the puck deep and there were Calle Järnkrok and Auston Matthews forechecking with alacrity, with Mark Giordano deep in support, and when Tampa tried to break out Alex Killorn threw a cross-ice pass on his backhand across his own blue line.

In Game 1 the Leafs backed off, over and over, like every puck could be the one that killed them. This time Mitch Marner decided to jump the pass and took it away and drew a penalty. Bam. That allowed John Tavares to fight to win a faceoff, and when the puck reached Marner at the right point he gathered the puck and took a step and beat Andrei Vasilevskiy with a slap shot, more or less clean. That doesn’t happen often, if ever, but Marner was so self-assured, so calm. It almost felt weirdly inevitable, after the fact. It took 47 seconds.

“Takes charge of the game for us, right away,” Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe said. “Now we have a series, get out on the road, and we’ll have to play better than we did tonight.

“Let’s not get too excited. They’re going to have some guys back in their lineup.”

When Keefe was asked whether his preparation for Game 2 was about strategy or psychology, he had replied, a little bit of both. But mostly, it was simple: His guys had to play better. They had to be themselves.

“I did wait just to see, in case it went behind me or something like that. I didn’t want to give up an odd-man rush,” Marner said. “Just trusting myself to make a play.”

Trust. This game was a renewal of the idea of these Leafs, with Marner as the starting gun, in a 7-2 win, after Game 1’s 7-3 loss. A core value of this team is that superstars are worth paying for, and the big money doled out to Tavares — then William Nylander and Marner and Matthews, with Morgan Rielly tacked on a little later — has informed every single thing since. Every salary-cap crunch, every bargain veteran who grew up in Ontario and was willing to spend his dotage as a Leaf, every first-round pick thrown into a deal to clear a leaden contract, every free agent that left and sometimes flourished, in the Zach Hyman mould: Those were all ripples surrounding the stones.

And the team is supposed to defend and attack with speed and pressure, and attack one net while protecting the other. The Game 1 flop was most notable for how little they seemed to trust that — how much they shrank back defensively, how little they moved the puck with purpose and control, how little they pushed.

Fear can spread but belief can be collective, and if Tampa flipped the switch in Game 1, the Leafs flipped one here. Next thing you knew Giordano was fighting Zach Bogosian, who was one of the two defencemen in for the injured Victor Hedman and Erik Cernák. (There were more fights later.) Ilya Samsonov was comfortable, this time. It was hard, for a long time, to find a Leafs player who wasn’t really moving his feet.

“I talk with goalie coach, with Curtis (Sanford),” said Samsonov, when asked what was different for him. “Maybe was too nervous in the first game, was big change for me, first game in the playoffs, in Toronto, was so different from where I played. Less nervous today.”

Put simply, that is what this team is supposed to be, with stars as the engines and depth in support. Tavares scored the second goal midway through the period after Rielly drove the puck deep and found him in the circle; it was Tavares’s second 5-on-5 goal since March 1. Nylander added a third goal with five minutes left in the period, and Rielly picked up his third primary assist.

In Game 1, Matthews was really the only core guy you could point at and appreciate. In this game Marner jumped a puck that he could have let lie, and what you saw was a team that was given permission to just let it all hang out.

We should say, this was a game the Leafs should win. Tampa was without Hedman, with a new but undisclosed injury, and without Cernák, a top-three Lightning defenceman. Toronto, meanwhile, had enough desperation to haul a train. How many playoff series have you seen where the home team loses Game 1 and plays like their lives depend on it in Game 2? If Tampa was willing to mail in most of the last three months of the season, it just might be willing to accept a road split to start a playoff series.

“This game had nothing to do with Victor Hedman being out of the game,” Cooper said. “We’ve won games in this league without Victor Hedman. I could sit here and go through 100 years of clichés. One team wins Game 1, the next team gets the next one. Which one do you want. At the end of the day, did we play hard enough to win? Probably not. Was there a team that was a little bit more urgent? Just look at last year’s series. It’s the exact same, just flip it. But it’s not because of one guy.”

But these are the Leafs so we have to grade on a curve, because after that jittery too-small performance in Game 1 there was a real chance this team could simply implode.

But after a brief burst of second-period shakiness Tavares made it 4-1 on the way to a hat trick, on a sharp Nylander zone entry and Rielly’s fourth assist — Rielly has taken a lot of criticism this year, but on this night he drove the puck the other way with purpose — and the Leafs were home and dry. The third period turned into a circus — fights and more goals and fans getting chesty and a building that felt like it had been released, like it had permission to act like front-runners too. If you wanted to savour the end, you had lots of time to do it.

Tampa without two of their top three defenceman is not the same animal — the Mikhail Sergachev-Darren Raddysh pairing was treated like lunch — but the Leafs playing without hesitation isn’t, either. This series remains far from over, but it could have been halfway there. Instead, for now, the Leafs remembered who they are.

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