Toronto Maple Leafs finally welcome back Dave Keon
The Maple Leafs have finally buried their most inexplicably exposed hatchet, one that goes back nearly as long as their Stanley Cup drought, in welcoming Dave Keon back to perhaps the most conspicuous unoccupied spot in their Legends Row outside the Air Canada Centre.
Beyond the kind of work ethic, leadership and ability he showed in his time in Toronto, it's worth noting that Keon is still alive, and such elemental considerations are necessary when it comes to this sort of thing. The other two ex-Leafs going in for bronzing shuffled off this mortal coil long ago – it’s no fun saluting coffins, and therein lies the problem when your most glorious moments have long since faded to the same grainy clips on repeat, and the whole thing verging on creepy ritual re-enactment that lacks just a Ouija board, a few candles and everybody holding hands to be complete.
When the Leafs hold their ceremony this fall for Keon, and the late pair of Turk Broda and Tim Horton whose glory days are even further in the past, no fan (and of course and especially, no trollin’ rival fan) will need to be reminded that it’ll mark exactly 50 years since the start of their last Stanley Cup-winning season (with all due respect to Messrs. Shanahan and Babcock, who seem to have a clue and a track record about how to point them in that direction, I’m going to go out on no limb and write off this spring).
The Keon estrangement goes back nearly as long, to 1975. That it was part of the general buffoonery that surrounded the team during the Harold Ballard years, an ownership era that compares to today’s MLSE in much the same manner that Fred Flintstone’s car resembles the space shuttle, now seems irrelevant (and even a little overrated, Keon having been back in 2007 and 2013 for recurring anniversary commemorations). Let’s just say these kind of lengths are pushing into dangerous territory, failures apparently in defiance of the laws of averages, regressions to the means, and general karma. Anyone who actually remembers experiencing the last time the Leafs won a Cup is nearing retirement age or already there. When the Keon montage unrolls, their eyes will mist. Everybody else will be perfectly justified in rolling theirs.
That’s the great divide these kind of ceremonies expose, and it throws into relief something that Shanahan, Babcock & Co. are competing against, as much as the other 29 teams in the NHL chasing the same one trophy: Mortality. The one notion all ages agree on is to just get on with it, lads – a Cup before we die, if only to stop these reminders of victories past, receding as fast as the hairline, if only to stop some smart-alecky type from copying the funeral arrangements of a Cleveland Browns fan of a couple years ago.
And oh yes, of course: welcome back, Davey.
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