Reading the tea Leafs

Damien Cox has a column in the Star today about the Leafs chances for going all the way this year. (If you know Cox, or the Leafs for that matter, you know that answer is "not good.")

Cox notes that new head coach Paul Maurice was born in 1967, the year the Leafs last won the Stanley Cup.

I just know there are a few thousand guys in blue-and-white jerseys furiously trying to determine whether this is a sign of hope or a harbinger of doom: "Do I add up all the players' birth dates, or just the ones on the active roster?"

I swear to God, Leafs fans are worse than the son in the mental institution in Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols":

Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.

James G. says the Leafs will win tonight 3-2. (But then, he would, wouldn't he?) I predict they don't find their legs until late October or November.