The Leafs are the Best: An oral history of ‘The Passion Returns’ VHS video (2024)

“This has been… an unbelievable… turn of events!”

If you’re a Maple Leafs fan of a certain age, you know the moment. Those words conjure it instantly. They belong to Bob Cole, and they came from the immediate aftermath of Nikolai Borschevsky’s Game 7 overtime goal against the Red Wings on May 1, 1993. You can hear Cole’s voice, probably picture Borschevsky getting bear-hugged by Wendel Clark, or Cliff Fletcher’s ear-to-ear grin, or Brian Papineau going nuts with a water bottle. You’re right back in the moment, all these years later.

If you’re not a Leafs fan, your eyes have already rolled deep into the back of your head.

Look, I hear you. That 1993 run didn’t end with a Stanley Cup, or even a trip to the Final. But Leaf fans won’t shut up about it. Almost three decades later, they – ok fine, we – still go on and on about that season. It’s the most beloved Leafs team since the Original Six days, and it’s not even close. If you’re a fan of another team, you might be completely confused.

But if you’re a Leafs fan, you get it. And here is something else you almost certainly got: A copy of a VHS tape called The Passion Returns that came out later that year. You probably got it for Christmas, and had watched it a dozen times by New Years. And you know, to this day, that it is a masterpiece.

Everything about The Passion Returns is just about perfect, from the overly dramatic opening credits, to the heavy dose of early-90s dance music, to the heartstring-tugging epilogue after they lose to the Kings. It’s so over the top. The Leafs weren’t the only team to make a season-in-review tape in the ‘80s and ‘90s to commemorate a season where they didn’t even win anything (no really, save your punchlines, your team probably had one too). They were just the only team to reach the absolute peak of the art form.

It really was, as a wise man once said, an unbelievable turn of events. But how did this thing get made? And why? And why does it still resonate with so many Leafs fans, even almost three decades later?

We decided to find out, by talking to the people who made the tape, the faces that appeared on it, and the fans who loved every minute of it. And along the way, we’re also going to talk about a very unfortunate haircut, and, yes, whatever the hell that music video was.

– Sean McIndoe

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The Toronto sports and media landscape in October 1992 would be unrecognizable to many fans today. The Argonauts were a year removed from playing home games in front of 50,000 people at SkyDome. The Raptors didn’t exist. The Blue Jays — who before the month’s end would claim their first World Series championship — were unquestionably the toast of the town, if not the entire country.

The Maple Leafs? After missing the playoffs earlier that spring, expectations were low entering the 1992-93 NHL season, despite the addition of Pat Burns behind the bench and the prospect of a full season with Doug Gilmour as their No. 1 centre.

Damien Cox, Toronto Star Maple Leafs beat reporter in ’92-’93, author, The Last Good Year: Seven Games that ended An Era: My expectations were not very high. It’s hard to explain to people now, but they really weren’t even a consideration to be a playoff team… we’re not even talking Stanley Cup. When the season started that year, they still didn’t have Dave Andreychuk. They had Grant Fuhr. Bits and pieces, but not anything solid. Gilmour wasn’t a superstar at that time. I don’t think there were any expectations at all.

Sean McIndoe, high school student in ’92-’93: I remember there being a little bit of optimism at the start of the season because they’d been OK down the stretch after the Gilmour trade. And more importantly, Pat Burns was going to come in and finally teach them how to play defense. Then they went out for the home opener and lost 6-5 and it was like, OK, yep, same old Leafs.

On television, every Maple Leafs game was produced by Molstar Communications, a subsidiary of Molson Brewery, who owned both the NHL’s national Canadian broadcast rights and the Maple Leafs regional rights. Regional games were aired on the Global Television Network across southern Ontario, while CBC carried national Leafs games on Hockey Night in Canada.

One Molstar employee in the fall of 1992 was 34-year-old, Mark Askin. Entering his seventh year producing games for Molstar on both CBC and Global, and as a lifelong, long-suffering Leafs fan, the Toronto native would bring a unique perspective to his work during the season, and in the summer of ’93 once tasked with a special assignment…

Mark Askin, senior producer with Molstar in ’92-’93: I grew up a Leafs fans. I remembered the night the Leafs won in ‘67. I remember the night Bobby Baun scored, I watched it on TV with my dad. My uncle and dad kept payments on season tickets. We’d go down in section 67, row B, seats 11 and 12. Fifteen-to-20 times a year. They were the highlights of my year.

In 1992, pre-internet, newspapers were at the peak of their power in terms of their ability to shape opinion and distribute information. TSN was the only 24/7 sports network in town. Toronto’s first all-sports radio station, The Fan 1430, was a month old when the Leafs season began.

Cox: There was a bit of rivalry between the baseball media and the hockey media and the baseball media were riding high. The CFL was looking south (for expansion), Rocket Ismail had come north. A lot of attention was on the States and in some people’s minds, baseball had become the preeminent sport (in Toronto). (Harold) Ballard had only recently died. By then you were 15 years of (the Leafs) being run into the ground and the Blue Jays were this professional organization with the biggest payroll in baseball. The Leafs were in a lot of ways, a joke.

McIndoe: I know it sounds crazy to today’s fans, but it’s true. The Leafs mattered, but the Blue Jays ruled. They weren’t just winning, they were signing all the top free agents and making the Yankees and Red Sox cry about how unfair it was that Toronto had all the money. And the town was going crazy for all of it. Then you looked at the Leafs and thought “Man, what if they got good too?”

Led by Doug Gilmour’s Leafs record 127 points, and a Jack Adams-winning performance from Burns behind the bench, the Leafs exceeded every pre-season prognostication by posting 99-points, good for third in the Norris Division behind the Chicago Blackhawks (106 points) and Detroit Red Wings (103). Despite finishing just four points back of Detroit, the Leafs were big underdogs entering their first-round series against the Red Wings and the league’s No. 1 offence.

Doug Gilmour, Maple Leafs forward in ’92-’93: People forget what you did in the regular season. People remember what you do in the playoffs.

Mark Osborne, Maple Leafs forward in ’92-’93: We were the underdogs. And yet there was a belief that because of Burnsie and our style of play that something positive would result of it.

Cox: Detroit was such a powerhouse or an evolving powerhouse. Toronto was not in the same class back then. Once the Leafs won Games 3 and 4, you went ‘holy sh*t.’ Even in Game 7, nobody thought they were going to win. Maybe they did, I don’t know. But once they beat Detroit, everything changed.

McIndoe: On paper, beating a team that was four points ahead of you shouldn’t feel like a giant upset. But these were the Leafs, so we all knew they weren’t going to pull it off. Then they did, and suddenly you looked around and the Hawks were out, the Smythe didn’t have a powerhouse for once, and you were like, ‘Wait a second, something could happen here.’

Inside the Hockey Night in Canada production truck producing Game 7 for Hockey Night in Canada, was Askin. In the early ‘90s, Molstar had a deal with Quality Special Products to produce VHS hockey videos. Askin had served as a writer and producer for many of them including, Great Plays from Great Games, Hockey’s Hardest Hitter, and The NHL 75th anniversary video. As the 1992-93 playoffs progressed, he began to campaign for a new project.

Askin: I kept saying (to my bosses) we’ve got to do a video. Toronto hasn’t seen anything like this before. We were talking about it as the playoffs went along and after Borschevsky scored, we were like, ‘We gotta do something.’ The second round, it went seven games, and OK, ‘We’re doing this.’ Then, after losing to Gretzky in Game 7 of the third round it’s like, ‘When do we start?’

Any videos now have to be produced by the NHL. Individual teams can’t produce their own videos. Back then, yes, you had to get permission to use the footage. But we just decided we’re going to do a video. We asked the Leafs and they must have said ‘yes. You want to do a video? Well, you’re a rights holder, go ahead and do it.’

Production for ‘The Passion Returns’ began immediately after the Maple Leafs were eliminated by the Los Angeles Kings. During the Leafs’ locker cleanout day, Maple Leafs director of communications Bob Stellick helped Askin secure interviews with GM Cliff Fletcher, Pat Burns, and the players. Askin tabbed media members such as Gord Stellick, Scott Morrison and Cox to add their perspective. Leafs radio and TV (on Global) play-by-play announcer Joe Bowen would serve as host and narrator.

Joe Bowen, Leafs TV and radio play-by-play voice in ’92-’93 and narrator, The Passion Returns: (Askin) had it all scripted out. He knew what players they had and I think they had the interviews done, or the vast majority of them done. I was sort of near the end of this thing to kind of tie it all together. And it was a lot of fun to do. It was still very fresh in our minds.

For the next month, Askin and his editor, Ken Moe, set up shop in a rented editing suite at OFF’N Online Soundhouse at King and Spadina in downtown Toronto. The video needed to be completed by mid-August to ensure it could start selling before the start of the following season. With the season so fresh in his mind, and the city still buzzing from the playoff run, Askin knew exactly what he wanted to include and who he was making the video for.

Askin: I wanted the fans to like it. I figured if I liked it, then they would too. This video wasn’t just a summer project. The one guy that deserves as much credit as I get, is the editor, Ken Moe. He has since passed away. (The Passion Returns) isn’t as fancy as things are today. But I don’t think a Leafs fan worries about fancy. There’s an old saying: ‘We’re doing television for people in television.’ That kind of thinking was in my mind as I said to myself, ‘No, we’re doing this for the guy who wasn’t able to stay up (and watch). Or the guy for whom this was his first (playoff) run.’

McIndoe: I can confirm that we did not care about fancy. Leaf fans idolized a guy wearing cow legs, we weren’t going to get picky.

In Round 2, the Maple Leafs drew the St. Louis Blues, who — backstopped by a red-hot Curtis Joseph in goal — had just swept the heavily-favoured Chicago Blackhawks. A segment in The Passion Returns looks back on Game 1’s classic finish with Gilmour’s double-OT winner.

Askin: There’s a piece of video on that reel that no one else has unless you steal it from the video — Gilmour’s goal against St. Louis in Game 1. The double OT goal from behind the net? That doesn’t exist anywhere except in that video. When you see it (elsewhere) today it’s been stolen from the video because I have the only copy of that and it got burned (off the VHS). (The original) is a three-quarter-inch tape that sits in my office downstairs.

Dominic Moore, former NHL forward, 12-year-old Leafs fan in ’92-’93: Dougie Gilmour was my absolute hero. He ended up being a big influence on me and the way I played. He always seemed to have two black eyes. He had a gritty, two-way style that I tried to emulate. Those years were incredibly special, for sure. The drama of Game 7s in the playoffs.

Cox: All three series they played that spring was high emotion. The St. Louis one people don’t talk about as much, but that was a f*cking war. I remember the guys on St. Louis — they were a big, strong, tough team with good goaltending. It was a war. It really was. It was a physical, nasty series.

Osborne: Each of the series, teams were very close to each other in terms of the standings or competitiveness. It wasn’t as though we were the Montreal Canadiens of the ’70s that were steamrolling through other teams.

McIndoe: Game 1 of the Blues/Leafs series may have been the best start-to-finish playoff game I’ve ever seen, with the perfect finish from Gilmour. And remember, this was literally 48 hours after the Borschevsky game. The Leafs played every second night for six weeks, with no gaps in the schedule like we get these days. It was the perfect rhythm, where you had game day, then a day to react to whatever had just happened, and then another game. That’s part of why that run was so memorable for fans, we never came up for air.

A clip of colourful Blues GM Ron Caron making a series of animated hand gestures from his box in St. Louis precedes the Passion Return’s highlight pack for Game 3.

Cox:: He’d be yelling ‘f–k you’ to the media, and the next day he’d be the most charming guy ever. He would just lose his sh*t during games. He saw everybody as the enemy. It was only my fourth year on the beat. I had no experience with a playoff run, at all. I’d never covered the Leafs winning a series. In some ways I didn’t really understand what was happening until all of a sudden, they were up against L.A. and it was like, ‘Holy sh*t, they could go to the Stanley Cup Final.’

By the way, about that hair, Doug…

McIndoe: So we have to talk about the hair, right.

Bowen: The worst. The worst. The worst!

Moore: Dougie Gilmour’s hairstyle was legendary in that video.

Gilmour: I even look at it myself and I say, ‘What were you thinking?’

McIndoe: At that point, every Maple Leaf fan thought Doug Gilmour was the absolute coolest guy on the planet. Then he shows up looking like Edward Scissorhands drove over to your house in a convertible. I’m still not over it. Let’s move on.

At the 21:00 minute mark of The Passion Returns Askin inserted a 30-second clip of a music video from a cheesy-yet-catchy song concocted by veteran forward Glenn Anderson, and starring the entire Maple Leafs team.

Richard Samuels, musician/co-writer The Leafs are The Best: I was playing at the piano bar at the Yorkville Four Seasons. (Anderson) just stumbled in one night and he was digging what I was doing. And he said, ‘I want to write a song for the team that could get them kind of fired up in the dressing room before we go on the ice. Something we could play in the locker room, maybe something that they’ll even play at Maple Leaf Gardens when we score a goal or something.’ And I was like a kid in a candy store. I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m in.’

I had a very small modest home studio. And then he said, ‘Richard, I’m gonna call you tomorrow or the next day,’ which he did. And he sent me some lyrics. And the lyric was ‘The Leafs are the best, better than all the rest.’ And he was really fired up. And I went, ‘OK, we need more than that, right? Where are we gonna go?’ So he came to my house. And I had an idea for a melody. So I sat down on the piano and I just started humming a melody. And it kind of went along with the lyric he wrote. Probably within a week, we went back and forth. It was like ping pong. And then we kind of had the song written.

Christopher Plock, musician, The Leafs are the Best: I was gigging quite heavily with Richard Samuels. He just called me in to sing parts. This was his and Glenn’s baby. Once the playoffs started, we just changed the lyrics. ‘The playoffs are here, let’s get it into high gear.’ It’s the same song, just adaptable, depending on the time of the year. That’s why they wrote two versions, in case they got into the playoffs.

It was a little hokey. Hokey things can really grab hold.

Samuels: When Glenn sent me the first draft of the lyric I went, ‘This was going to be so easy, because the lyrics are so simple.’ And I could come up with a really catchy little melody that’s memorable, that people can walk away singing. That’s what I wanted.

McIndoe: The lyrics literally include the line “Toronto Maple Leafs, forget your disbeliefs.” As a lyricist, Glenn Anderson was a hell of a hockey player.

Samuels: We made CDs and some I think some cassettes at the time. They sold them at Maple Leaf Gardens. I think some of the locally-owned record stores (sold them too).

Local musicians, including Bon Jovi’s lead guitarist Phil X, gathered at Cherry Beach Studios in Toronto. The song was recorded in one day with Anderson footing the bill. With the song recorded, Anderson was insistent on shooting a music video at Maple Leaf Gardens, with the entire Leafs team involved.

Samuels: What I liked about Glenn is that he dances to the beat of his own drum. He’s a go-getter. He’s always so enthusiastic. And he was just really fired up about this.

Mike Boland, co-producer, The Leafs are the Best, friend of Anderson’s: See, when Glenn gets the bit in his teeth, you can’t stop him. He’s a force.

Osborne: Andy is Andy. He was one unique person.

Jamie Macoun, Maple Leafs defenceman in ’92-’93: Glenn’s a different character to begin with. It’s not so much turning him down, it’s the fact that if you’ve got the whole team buying into something, then you’re more or less obligated to do it. It’s team togetherness. Once he convinced a few guys, you would’ve been going against the team.

Askin: Anderson was a different guy. That’s all I’ll say. I think that team really enjoyed each other. Does it strike me odd that that team would do that? Not really. They had a lot of characters on that club.

After beating the Winnipeg Jets 4-2 on Saturday, Mar. 6, the Leafs were supposed to have Sunday off. But with the team now in second place in the Norris Division, Anderson convinced most of them to return to the rink and spend four hours singing along as Boland, Askin and others shot the video.

Gilmour: Truthfully, we just wanted the day off. But Andy made us do it. It was just a really complete team that way. I still laugh about it to this day.

Macoun: Calgary actually did one similar to (The Leafs are the Best). The (Chicago) Bears had done one, and they had some guys that could sing and play instruments. And I said I’ll participate if we’re going to sing. It’ll be bad but it’ll at least be us. But they dubbed the whole thing. And I thought, I’m not doing it. That’s too embarrassing. In Toronto, Glenn’s trying to do the same thing. The team was on a high. Gilmour and everyone else was telling me I had to do this. I said ‘Alright, because I don’t want to be the only guy left out.’ It was still very, very embarrassing.

McIndoe: Jamie Macoun was on the Calgary team that did “You Can’t Touch a Flame When It’s Red Hot”. He knew the risks. He could have prevented this.

Boland: Glenn marched everybody out on the ice. You don’t argue with Glenn. He was so determined to make this an influential element to the playoff run. That’s the way Glenn thinks, man.

Osborne: That was just plain goofy. That would never happen today.

Gilmour: We didn’t know what was going on until we got there. It was interesting, let’s put it that way.

Boland: They see that it’s going to be something that is going to raise the spirits and be a team-building thing where they can all participate together, right? At that moment, Glenn had five Stanley Cups. And they all knew about The Boys on the Bus.

Anderson roamed the ice, directing Boland on which shots to get. As musicians mimicked playing the song, Gilmour sat on a motorcycle in a bandana, waving a single finger in the air as players swayed in unison.

Gilmour (on sitting on the motorcycle): That was my job. It was kind of corny but it was funny.

Macoun: Some guys are just natural at that sort of stuff. Gilmour, Krushelnyski, they love to ham it up.

Samuels: If you looked at their facial expressions like Jamie, like Wendel, they were like, ‘Are you serious? I have to do that?’ Gilmour was a great sport.

McIndoe: I would have paid a million dollars to be in the room when they asked Pat Burns to be in the skit at the end.

Plock: (Players) were really well behaved. No one brought much character or personality. They looked like they were a bunch of Grade 8s having to be part of the school dance. Clark didn’t look like he wanted to be there at all. The European players had less of an attitude than our Canadian boys. No one was acting like they were high-maintenance. Some of them were just a little grumpier than others.

Samuels: I think we (played the song during the video shooting) probably a dozen times. Glenn was aware that he didn’t want to keep everybody there for that long. It was probably fun for the first hour.

Bowen: I’m not sure that the guys were real good at singing, but they certainly gave it a shot.

Boland: I’ll tell you what it isn’t: it isn’t Fleetwood Mac.

Even actor Mike Myers made an appearance in a skit at the end of the video.

Boland: That’s actually easy. Glenn says to Mike, ‘Hey, guess what, you’re gonna be in the video.’ Mike says, ‘Yep, OK.’ Glenn’s got power, man.

McIndoe: Mike Myers was so mad they forced him to do this that years later he made The Love Guru as revenge.

Gilmour: It was fun. We were laughing at ourselves.

Mitch DeRosier, bassist, Born Ruffians, lifelong Leafs fan: The song is objectively terrible, not unlike any other Super Bowl Shuffle attempt to blend music and sports, but it also has a special place in my heart. Sometimes even brutal music, when paired with a thing you love, can speak to you I guess?

I don’t know what my favourite part is, but it’s a dead heat between Jamie Macoun being possessed by the very rhythm of the song at 5:55, or the band workshopping the lyrics in the studio. “Let’s get it into high gear… you guys like that?” Brilliant stuff.

Macoun: It’s not so bad now, but that first decade after that, it was so embarrassing. Someone would put it on and I’d leave the room.

Askin: It was on the radio. It was a part of those 41 days. Our cameras shot (the video). It was so silly, yet so fun. (There was Hockey Sock Rock, but it was so brutal. The Leafs are the best, better than all the rest… (laughs). It was just so silly.

The Passion Returns opens with still shots of the street signs at the corner of Church and Carlton — where Maple Leafs Gardens is situated in downtown Toronto. The sound of an orchestra slowly builds over images of great Leafs teams of the distant past. The video’s title is then splashed across the screen over an exterior shot of Maple Leafs Gardens at night, just as the orchestra climaxes with a dramatic cymbal crash. No voices. Just music and images.

Askin: I like two kinds of music. One is major drama. I like to dissolve shots, cut it to the beat. And everything else I like is the backbeat, which is why I’m a Huey Lewis and the News freak. I think dramatic music draws people in. I think when the music is really dramatic, and the pictures match it, you’ve got people’s attention. So, I loved that (opening) music. Also, it was free. It was provided to us. We used it for something else during the season. Molstar was paying for other kinds of music. Quality Special Products had all of that (dance) music. We thought if we want to make the music reflective of the era of the team, let’s put that in there, too.

Ah yes, the dance music. Many of the songs featured throughout The Passion Returns were popular dance songs at the time, including this 2 Unlimited track that Askin played over the video’s closing credits.

McIndoe: Early ’90s dance music was amazing and still holds up well to this day. I will not be taking questions at this time.

The Kings series featured high-drama on and off the ice: Clark vs. McSorley; An enraged Burns taking a run at Kings counterpart Barry Melrose; two overtime games, a key Leafs player skipping Game 5 to attend the birth of his child, and Askin’s favourite scene in The Passion Returns.

Osborne: My wife was waking me up, and she said, ‘I think this is the day.’ I said, ‘Why, you think I’m going to score in Game 5?’ She said ‘No, I think you’re going to become a father today.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I was trying to settle myself down emotionally from the thrill of my daughter being born, being in the middle of this dream run, and then getting on a plane to go to L.A. for Game 6.

Askin: Look at when Wendel scores in Game 6 against the Kings. (Burns) runs down the bench with a cheshire cat grin and the look is, ‘We got them.’ Burnsie was the fulcrum. They would have gone through a wall for him. My favourite shot in that whole video — after they’ve lost to the Kings — (is when Burns) raised Wendel’s hand going off the ice. And then what does he say right at the end of the video? It’s the proudest he’s ever been of a hockey team. I talked to Burnsie two or three months before he died. We were good pals. He said to me, ‘It’s the best year I ever had, Marco. Most fun. Never saw anything like that.’

Bowen: The adrenaline had been shut off. And you could just see what they had gone through and how much it had taxed them. And I thought that part of the video was also very telling as well. I think that a lot of players would remember that emotion: we were that close, now I’m so tired, I can’t believe it, but we almost got there.

McIndoe: I’m not ready to talk about this yet.

When it was over, the Maple Leafs’ 21 playoff games in the spring of ‘93 had taken place over just 41 days, an unheard of grind by today’s scheduling standards. Askin had even briefly considered naming the video “21 games in 41 nights,” before “The Passion Returns,” popped into his head one day during a jog.

Cox: It was a blur to me. Game after game after game. You had no time to catch your breath. By the end of that L.A. series, I don’t know how we would have covered the Stanley Cup Final. Most of us were just run out.

Osborne: 21 games in (41) nights. We had no time to recover. It was exhausting and exhilarating.

Bowen: When we were doing it, Mark mentioned that they had kind of settled on (The Passion Returns) and I said, ‘It’s perfect.’ I was old enough to remember the Stanley Cups in the ‘60s, and we went through the ‘80s where there was just no hope at all, with Harold (Ballard) and everything else.

Moore: The title was perfect. There was such an unleashing of passion that had been bottled up for a long time.

McIndoe: As over-the-top as it is, it’s the perfect title, because it works two ways. It’s the passion returning to the team, sure, because they finally went on a real run for the first time in 15 years. But more importantly, that spring was about the passion returning to a fan base that had been beaten down by the Ballard era. It was like, ‘oh right, being a Leafs fan can be fun and not just a constant source of embarrassment and sadness.’ That season let us all turn the page on Ballard once and for all.

Bowen: We had a golf outing at the end of the season. And (Leafs assistant coaches) Mike Murphy and Mike Kitchen came to play in this golf tournament. And then everybody came back to my house for a barbecue. And I had (a copy of The Passion Returns) and Murph and Kitch, they hadn’t seen any of it. Then they came down and watched it. And I mean they cried. It was really emotional. I think that they just understood how close they were to getting to the Stanley Cup Final and it would have been a wonderful event with Montreal and Toronto playing in the final.

Almost 30 years later, The Passion Returns and the ‘92-’93 Maple Leafs still hold a special place in the hearts and minds of everyone associated with it.

Gilmour: I had that tape. And when I was at the cottage, the boys would put the VHS tape in there all the time.

Osborne: I still have that VHS. You sometimes get teased by (NHL.com writer) Mike Zeisberger. I’d see him in the press box and he’d sing that goofy song. It’s a great keepsake. It captured the entire season and how the passion returned to Toronto. We remember the Blue Jays winning those two World Series and yet the city was going absolutely berserk for hockey when the Leafs got out of Round 1.

Bowen: I run into people all the time, who tell me that they loved it and have watched it so many times. It’s really a gratifying thing, for sure.

Moore: I literally had every line memorized.

McIndoe: I still have the VHS tape. Do I have anything in my house that can play a VHS tape? No, I do not, but that doesn’t matter. I’m keeping this thing until the day I die. Then I’m willing it to Doug Gilmour’s hairstylist.

Cox: I get a kick out of it. I thought it was a real honour. I thought it was cool. I had a full head of hair and those days are long gone (laughs). I feel like I was part of a cult, like Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don’t know if I’m Riff Raff or who I was (laughs). I feel more of a connection to that year and that team than in any of the teams in any of the other years in any of the other sports that I’ve covered.

Bowen: It’s the greatest hockey video ever made.

Askin: I want to say what an incredible honour it was to do it. Because I’m not just a Leafs fan. To have done that video and to be associated with that uniform… the passion returned for me. I was pinching myself in that edit booth. ‘Are you kidding me? I’m doing this?’It was the most special time of my professional life.

(Top Photo: Graig Abel / Getty Images)

– With files from Mike Cormack