I grew up a Leafs fan during the Harold Ballard era. Will his curse on the team ever end?

In the winters of the ’70s and ’80s, my Saturday nights in Guelph, Ont., were spent dreading church the next morning, watching the Maple Leafs lose — yet again — on Hockey Night in Canada, and listening to my father swear as the Maple Leafs lost — yet again — on Hockey Night in Canada. 

I’m kidding. Dad didn’t watch the Leafs; he’d do something more interesting like stare at the furnace or dice carrots. But I dutifully sat in front of that flickering black and white TV, eating animal crackers in my onesie (which was a bit weird by the time I graduated high school), and watched as the pride of Toronto got pounded. Every time, I wondered (a) what were the chances that an earthquake or a hurricane or locusts would cancel church? and (b) will the Leafs ever win another Stanley Cup?

The Leafs were bad. Reliably, relentlessly and ridiculously bad — worse than my Aunt Bea’s soda biscuits (are anybody’s soda biscuits good?). And they were bad because their owner, a felonious blowhard named Harold Ballard, cared more about making a buck than making the playoffs. 

Born in Toronto in 1903, Ballard came from money, but he always wanted more. 

After fostering a friendship with Stafford Smythe — son of longtime Leafs owner Conn Smythe — and sitting on the Leafs board alongside him, Ballard methodically removed, bought out or shoved aside every roadblock until he assumed full control of the team in 1972. 

Thus began the Ballard curse, a two-decade cavalcade of greed and incompetence that gutted the once-proud organization. 

Ballard fired coach after coach after don’t-bother-to-unpack coach, and traded away the best players. When Leafs legend and Hall of Famer Darryl Sittler was shipped to Philadelphia in exchange for a couple of forgettable Flyers, it was like swapping a Rolls-Royce for a Toyota (if the Toyota never back-checked and had chronic groin injuries). And those are just some of his dumb moves.

Consequently, when “Pal Hal” (Ballard) passed away in 1990, optimists said the curse was kaput and the Leafs could now win a Cup for the first time since 1967.

But a funny thing happened while everybody was planning the Stanley Cup parade and painting their butt cheeks blue and white: the Leafs didn’t win it all….