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Toronto Maple Leafs' centennial season-ticket packaging catches the eye

Toronto Maple Leafs' centennial season-ticket packaging catches the eye

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The Toronto Maple Leafs have among the most championship-starved fans in pro sports -- that goes for the other teams in the MLSE stable, too, though they haven’t had 49 years and counting since their last meal -- but say one thing for the organization: when it comes to pomp and circumstance, they don’t scrimp.

 

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Take this centennial season’s season-ticket-holders' package. As ever, each one carries an eye-popping price (in 2015, exclusive of those exorbitant license fees, they averaged out to between $41 and $207 a game, according to a 2016 court ruling). But in this season's case, each tells its own story from the days of WW1-era Canada through King Clancy and Keon and up to Auston Matthews. The very thought of tearing these tickets, old-school style, seems almost desecration. In an era of bar-code readers they’re made as much for stowing away with your other keepsakes as they are to get you in the arena while making the MLSE vaults bulge a little more.

 

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"It is a keepsake. It's something you want to remember, the experience," says Shannon Hosford, MLSE’s senior vice-president of marketing and fan experience.

 

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That's what they hope, anyway, as the team rebuilds from the ground up behind six rookies, including No. 1 pick Matthews. If they can look half as good as the tickets, that'll be progress. And for MLSE's marketing division, so far so good.

 

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“We were absolutely blown away when we saw the finished product,” says MLSE creative director Matt Coyle, whose award-winning department handled the design and brought in club historian Mike Ferriman and illustrator Conrad Garner to help execute the vision. “You hope for the best through the process and it came true.”

 

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The process has been five years in the making, with the history-minded packaging part of an overall Maple Leafs centennial campaign that includes a new logo, the Air Canada Centre's Legends Row that’ll add Turk Broda, Tim Horton and Dave Keon on Thursday, Friday’s “Top 100 Leafs” announcement, and for Saturday’s home opener, a ceremony that begins at 6 p.m., more than an hour before the Leafs and Bruins drop the puck on another season at the ACC.

 

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The same Sid Lee creative team that came up with MLSE’s Bloody Big Deal (not as much, it turned out, in the telling) and instantly iconic We The North spots, tied to Toronto FC and the Raptors respectively, has returned, too, with the “Stand Witness” TV spot that debuted Wednesday night. It too ties the past 100 years together -- the highs, the more recent lows, and turning the page into a new century of hockey, with a couple of easter eggs buried inside the 60-second torch-passing message.

 

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“The idea is to strike a balance between celebrating the past and looking ahead to the next 100 years,” said Hosford. “We’ve had some really good times and some really frustrating times – we wanted to own that, acknowledge that and look ahead.”