Everything the Leafs have done over nearly a decade has been in painful pursuit of that moment. It’s the moment they prove they’re the kind of team worthy of winning it all by mimicking how others had prospered. Year after year they slowly chipped away at their own identity, doing what had to be done to finally prosper.

The Leafs as we knew them had become difficult to recognize for seemingly all the right reasons in the name of “defense wins championships.”

Well, aside from one crucial detail: The same result as every other season; the Leafs won nothing.

Slowly and agonizingly, the Leafs have abandoned their most potent strengths in favour of covering up perceived weaknesses. They’ve morphed into a bland, milquetoast team with a borrowed identity that prioritizes nothing but playing The Right Way to an extreme fault. And it was all for absolutely nothing, as it led them to the same place they always end up anyway.

The ends did not come close to justifying the means — it just wasted a lot of people’s time. Most importantly, the entire prime years of the team’s core.

It’s not that the Leafs should not have prioritized their defensive game and structure after past playoff failures. There were legitimate concerns on that front that needed to be addressed for this team to make noise. The problem stems from how they’ve gone about it, an issue that’s been exacerbated over the team’s last two playoff runs.

“Safe is death.”

I keep coming back to those three words, a John Tortorella mantra born two decades ago when his Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup. It means aggressively asserting a team’s dominance knowing the risks are worth the reward for a highly skilled team capable of putting on relentless pressure to that fact.

The quote rattled around my brain throughout a series against the Boston Bruins where the Leafs averaged 1.7 goals per game — less than half of what they managed during the regular season. That’s a year after finishing the playoffs scoring exactly two goals in seven straight games. For this team in particular, it should be impossible.

That is, until you say those three words again and everything starts to click.

After several playoff failures to start the Matthews and Marner era, everything comes back to playing it safe.

The players they added, the players they didn’t; the players they kept, the players they moved on from — many personnel decisions were seemingly borne out of some type of risk aversion. Most moves did make the Leafs better, but a lot of them seemed to prioritize The Right Way. Whether it was Kyle Dubas or Brad Treliving, both made several moves in that vein where being a better team often felt secondary. Going over all those moves could fill another column. Besides, you already know them.

More than anything though, it’s how the team plays in the playoffs that speaks best to Toronto’s quest for safety above all else. That’s best represented by the team’s two best players, both of whom frequently drew deserved ire for their inability to create offense when it counts.

At a certain point, it’s not “bad luck” or “getting goalied” but simply the reality of the situation. Scoring below a point-per-game rate over more than 50 games certainly qualifies — especially when their contemporaries always find a way to flourish no matter the opponent. The Leafs’ two superstars don’t.

Since 2016-17, Matthews has averaged an Offensive Rating of plus-20 per 82 games during the regular season while Marner is at plus-14. Those are extremely high values that rate among the league’s very best with Matthews in the top five and Marner in the top 20. That’s their benchmark going into the playoffs, a reasonable expectation of what they can deliver.

They haven’t been even close.

How much of their Offensive Rating are they able to retain when it counts? Half.