HOCKEY LAST NIGHT: HAUNTED BY HAROLD'S GHOST

The Leafs honoured the 1967 Stanley Cup champions last night before a big 4-3 win over the Oilers, but it could only raise a temporary glow yesterday.

It's nice and long-overdue that the Toronto Maple Leafs are going to honour the 1967 Stanley Cup winners before tonight's game against the Edmonton Oilers.

Some will say that the only the centre-of-the-universe Leafs would recognize a 40-year-old championship before a game against a fellow Canadian team who's won five -- count 'em, five -- despite being around for much less time. But that's a sidebar.

The '67 Leafs are held up as a team who defined an era -- even though the '62-64 teams which won three in a row were far more impressive -- but by then, the late Harold Ballard (pictured) already had his hooks into the club and was on his way to incinerating all that history and tradition like he later did with Foster Hewitt's gondola.

The guys from that team, the great names such as George Armstrong, Bobby Baun, Red Kelly and most of all, Dave Keon, who was estranged from the Leafs for so long, deserve this, of course. Protocol calls for one to be all hushed and reverential instead of spraying invective like a skunk. Nevertheless, to any true Leafs fan with a sense of hockey history, it won't feel quite right. Maybe that's the modern world creeping in, but whatever, it's going to feel incomplete. Whatever's said tonight just won't feel genuine. We're going to be asked to act like the Leafs were just like the Habs and kept winning after the Original Six ended, but that didn't happen, of course, thanks to Harold's handiwork.

So sorry. It's great that Keon is going to be welcomed back. The fans are going to give him the loudest ovation as a way of apologizing for what Ballard put him through. Still, Pal Hal has been dead 17 years and the Leafs haven't played at the Gardens in eight, but they still haven't aired out the stench from his reign of franchise-killing error.

What the Leafs embodied to Ontario and to Canada would have eroded over time regardless. Still, the Canadiens won Cups through the early 1990s. The Detroit Red Wings, Toronto's other rival in the pre-Gary Bettman hockey world, became Hockeytown. Among the other Original Sixers, the New York Rangers won in 1994,and as for the Blackhawks and Bruins, who measures themselves against those loser organizations, which are also sad shells of themselves? If Ballard hadn't wrecked the Leafs and if Toronto fans hadn't put up with him, wouldn't they have won the Cup at some point in my lifetime? Probably.

No championships since 1967 -- 10 years before I was born -- and not much chance of winning another one so long as the Leafs are in the vise of of MLSE, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan and The Wonderful World of Gary Bettman. Until the Leafs win again, we're in purgatory -- although the temperature there is a lot more comfortable than it is where Ballard is probably spending all eternity. It's good on the Leafs for bringing the '67 players back, but there's only so much that can be done. Serendipitously enough, I have somewhere else to be tonight, and I'm glad.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.