TORONTO — For 48 hours, it swung like a pendulum. The hypotheticals, the what-ifs. The maybes and hopefully-nots.
It would go only one of two ways for these Toronto Maple Leafs. Win this do-or-die finale and cement this campaign as the one where it all turned, the one that brought real progress, that forever altered legacies — or fall short again and invite the vultures waiting to tear this whole thing apart, to end this blue-and-white era for good, to carry it away over the horizon.
That’s the thing about Game 7s. There is no middle ground. There are no do-overs. It’s a zero-sum battle — glory or catastrophe.
And Sunday night, under the Scotiabank Arena lights, in a cauldron of pressure and nerves and all the faint belief this city could manage, the Maple Leafs could only muster the latter.
“They were the better team tonight,” said a terse Craig Berube of the Florida Panthers after the dust had settled on the 6-1 drubbing, ending this series and perhaps this chapter of Maple Leafs history too. “They were the more desperate team tonight. They were the more aggressive team tonight. That’s what I take out of the game.
“You win a Game 6, that’s great — you come home, you’ve got to have a level of desperation, determination. And I didn’t feel we had it.”
It doesn’t take too thorough an examination of the game film to pinpoint where it all went south for the home side in this one. After a dominant opening salvo from the Cats was matched with a breakaway-laden response from the Leafs in the opening period, the two clubs came out after the first intermission sitting level on the scoresheet, feeling somewhat level off it.
And then the defending champs pushed again. And this time, they toppled the whole blue-and-white house of cards over.
“First period, I thought they came out a little bit hungrier than us. The last half of that period, we got our game going. And then, yeah — I don’t really know how it got away from us,” Auston Matthews said quietly from the locker room late Sunday.
“I liked our end of the first period — the second, you know, we gave them opportunities,” echoed linemate Mitch Marner. “And they didn’t miss.”
It was defender Seth Jones, specifically, who didn’t miss. Three minutes into the middle frame, after Matthews and Marner charged into the Panthers’ zone and managed to set up only a point shot that deflected off linemate Matthew Knies and skittered into the corner, Florida picked up the puck and turned on the Leafs.
They moved north in a display of veteran precision, Aleksander Barkov sending the puck past Matthews up the boards to Evan Rodrigues, who moved it on to Jones with a spinning backhand off the boards — the Cats defender collected it, carried it into Toronto’s zone, backed off Brandon Carlo, and wired it over Joseph Woll’s shoulder.
The crowd, raucous to that point, fell into a nervous murmur. And the Cats just kept coming.
Four minutes later, they drew blood again. This time, it was veteran Leaf-killer Brad Marchand authoring the sequence, charging down the left wing with the puck, darting around the offensive zone to link play between Florida’s forecheckers, peppering Woll — until finally the puck came to Marchand along the half-wall. No. 63 whipped it on net, spurring a hefty rebound from Woll, and watched young linemate Anton Lundell tuck it home.
By this point, the murmurs had turned to groans, the believers to doubters. The ghosts were circling. And still, the Panthers twisted the knife.
Just two minutes later, a third goal for the visitors. A John Tavares solo zone exit effort was intercepted by Jones and turned back the other way. An initial chance on Woll careened off the netminder’s pads and straight to A.J. Greer, who wired it across the crease to a waiting Jonah Gadjovich. Like No. 16 said, he didn’t miss.
Seven minutes, three goals, perhaps the worst period these Maple Leafs have strung together all season — and a series sunk.
“Obviously there was a period there where they get three, and we’re not able to weather the storm, or push back,” said Morgan Rielly of the second-frame stumble. “In there somewhere is a pretty crucial part of the game.”
“I felt like we were ready to play. I felt like we were in a good mindset,” Matthews lamented. “I thought the first 10 minutes, they came out strong, and the next 10 minutes I thought we controlled play. And then I just thought we had too many passengers throughout the rest of the game. We just weren’t on the same page.
“You know, they get a couple goals, and momentum, and then you’re chasing the game. And it’s hard to get it back, when you’re down three against a good team that plays sound defensively, like them.”
“That’s the right wording, I would say,” added Marner, whose future with this club remains uncertain, to put it lightly. “You can’t have passengers in a Game 7. It just sucks.”
For all the chatter coming into this night, into this series, into these playoffs, about the Maple Leafs being different, it was a telling performance. In many significant ways, these Leafs were different. Except for one, crucially important mark — their ability to rise to the moment when everything is on the line.
They’ve proven able to come out of the gates flying, as they did through the early games of both their 2025 series. They’ve even proven able to survive, to extend their season when their backs are against the wall. But it’s that age-old killer instinct — that mindset that allows teams to bear down and play with precision when a chance at glory’s on the line — that remains just beyond this group’s grasp.
Because really, it wasn’t just that seven-minute stretch of calamity. It was the whole thing.
Through 40 minutes, the Maple Leafs had allowed their opponent to amass more shot attempts (75) than any team had through two periods in any game this season — regular season or playoffs. By the end of the night, after the Cats had tacked on three more goals to truly bury the wayward home club, the Maple Leafs had matched the record for the largest margin of defeat for any home team in any Game 7, ever.
“We just didn’t handle the pressure that they came with tonight,” Berube assessed succinctly. “It obviously wasn’t good enough.”
“They just executed a lot better than we did. And, you know, once they got the lead, they kept pressuring us and we didn’t execute well through that,” added Tavares of the middle frame that skewered the Maple Leafs’ hopes on this night. “Obviously that led to their lead increasing, us trying to find our game and make up a big hole. Difficult to do against that team.”
What will sting most is how familiar it felt. The fact that it was the second straight performance in this barn that the Maple Leafs were blown out 6-1 in a crucial post-season game by these Panthers, Sunday’s result winding up a disappointing Part 2 to Wednesday’s Game 5 rout.
“That’s the frustrating part,” Berube said from the post-game podium Sunday, trying to pick through the damage. “We put ourselves in a good spot in both games coming home. Disappointing games for sure. We go down there, win a Game 6, play extremely well — it’s frustrating. I don’t have an answer.
“There’s obviously things that we’ve got to look at and talk about as an organization.”
As the night wore on, as the belief began to fade, even on the home bench, that exasperation boiled over, the coach laying into the men hunched over the boards, Marner doing the same.
“Frustration sets in,” Berube said. “When you don’t get everybody on board, doing the right things, playing together as a team, that’s what happens. That’s what happens. You can’t go into a game like tonight and have anybody not at their best. And that doesn’t mean, you know, fancy plays or all these skilled plays — you’re at your best when you’re highly competitive, winning your battles, desperation, doing everything possible to win the hockey game.
“We didn’t do that tonight. And that’s why the result was the result.”
On the other side of the glass, the Maple Leafs faithful made their frustration clear, too. Made sure those on the ice, and on the bench, and in the team suite, felt every bit of their misery — a disappointment so deeply entrenched, so aggressively expressed, even the opposing coach was defending the Maple Leafs by the end of the evening.
For the second straight game at Scotiabank Arena, the home side skated off the ice with boos raining down from the rafters. This time, beer cans came too, crashing and sputtering onto the sheet, leaving the ice discoloured as the final minutes bled off the clock. And the jerseys too, not one or two, but handfuls, tossed angrily over the glass as fans made for the exit, not bothering to stick around for a scene they’ve already witnessed too many times over.
“I mean, you feel for it,” said Marner, a hometown boy himself, of that dark outpouring from the fans. “I’m feeling the same way. It’s sad. It’s heartbreaking. It’s something you don’t enjoy. You know, we’re not happy with that outcome either.
“It’s devastating. We had a great year. Everything was going right. We had a great Game 6, and we fell short again.”
