By Stephen Johns

Fall is in the air in Toronto—and for our local sports teams, that means two things. One, just as it has for the past fifteen years, it means a premature ending to the Toronto Blue Jays’ season. Two, it marks the beginning of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ latest efforts at breaking what’s turning into a forty-one year-long hex.
The chances of it happening this year are virtually nil. Even Ron Wilson, who replaced Paul Maurice behind the Leaf bench in June, acknowledged as much in a recent interview. “We’re not going to win the Stanley Cup this year,” he announced last week. “There’s a news flash for you.” Which begs the question: if the head coach is writing off his own team, then why should we long-suffering Leaf fans even care about the 2008/09 NHL season? Alas, it’s what we do; we have to care about our favourite team, even if we know it’s futile, because that’s the masochistic pact we entered into. At least this promises to be an intriguing year down at the Air Canada Centre, because for the first time in ages it seems like Toronto’s engaged in an actual rebuilding effort. The Maple Leaf organization loves paying lip service to rebuilding—but now, with this year’s #1 draft pick Luke Schenn seemingly poised to start the year with the big club, it’s looking more and more like they’re actually doing it this time around. It’s an oddly refreshing change—although this opinion is subject to change after a month of bad results.
The Jays, meanwhile, at least made things mildly interesting for a few weeks before slipping back into competitive irrelevance. They wound up finishing fourth in the ultra-competitive American League East; that’s not great, especially since they still haven’t made the playoffs since 1993, but they did finish ten games over .500 and with a better win/loss record than one division champion (that’d be the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are about to end the Chicago Cubs’ World Series hopes for a 100th consecutive year). The trouble is that 2008 might’ve been Toronto’s best chance to make a run for the foreseeable future. The Boston Red Sox will be strong again next year; the New York Yankees, meanwhile, who endured an awful year by their standards, will spend the offseason throwing money around like a drunken sailor at a seaside bar. Of equal significance, the Tampa Bay Rays—the Tampa Bay Rays!—just won the division; they’re also young and still figuring out how to be successful. In other words, things aren’t looking particularly rosy for the Toronto Blue Jays heading forward.
Being a sports fan demands a constant balance between optimism and realism. At least two of our local teams are making that particular dance easier for us, because frankly, where the Jays and the Leafs are concerned, there’s not much reason for optimism these days. The Toronto Raptors, on the other hand, seem capable of breaking more than a few hearts this coming winter. We’ll have a better idea of how they’re shaping up in the next couple weeks.
Photo by stillsinflux from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.