In case you were wondering what your favourite Leafs blog was going to do for content during this hiatus, look no further. Well, keep looking, we’ll have other stuff too, but also look at this. It’s our official March Bracket…

Okay, so you aren’t particularly excited about this yet, but hopefully you will become very invested in this because you have absolutely nothing else to going on regarding sports outcomes.

We’re starting off by asking you, our valued reader to submit your 5 favourite Leafs from 4 distinct eras of the team that will make up our regions. It’s going to be those votes that influence who winds up on the bracket and establish the seeding. And you know because it’s the Leafs, we can’t just go with 64 player bracket, IT’S 67, BABY!!! WOOOOOOO!!!! There will be three play-ins so we can do this right.

Here are the regions:

Your Grandpa’s Leafs region: This covers off everything 1967 and earlier. The glory years when a team didn’t really need to be good, you just needed your players to lay off the cigarettes in playoff time and arrive sober-ish to games when the opposition was out getting trashed the night before. For a lot of you this should be an exercise in googling who is on Legend’s row, but for those of you are actually the Grandpa’s and are mad at me for drawing attention to how old you are, please tell us young whippersnappers why Slappy McTwirlytwig deserves consideration over Dave Keon.

The Darkest Timeline region: Really this could be any era post 1967 for the Leafs, but we’ll go with the Ballard era, post 1967 up until the day 1990 appeared on your calendar. There were a lot of good Leafs during this time. It’s just too bad they didn’t get a chance to do much.

False Hope region: Aw the Burns and Quinn eras. They felt so good at the time, but ultimately it just made the disappointment that much more intense. Still it was nice to grow up in an era where we dreamed bigger than just winning a single round of the playoffs. If Nikolai Borschevsky doesn’t make this bracket you are all dead to me.

Recency Bias region: This one is going to be a strong player moving through the bracket, and I look forward to William Nylander upsetting Johnny Bower in the final on the strength of a picture of Willy’s abs. This will be a fun division, and I think we are likely to use our play-in allotment on this group.

It would be nice to get the voting underway next week, so we’ll get all the submissions out of the way by Sunday and share the bracket with you all on Monday, March 16th.

Put them in which ever era you associate them with. For example I personally would put Wendel Clark in the The Darkest Timeline region, but you might associate him with the False Hope region more. Overall mentions of the players will count in the seeding, but wherever that player is mentioned the most is probably the region they will fall in.

If you want Mats Sundin and Auston Matthews both in the Final Four, you probably want to put Mats in the False Hope Region.

Through our twitter account, of course. Follow on the fun at @TLNdc. We’ll also be embedding the daily matchups in a post on this site, because twitter threads can be lost to the timeline.

Hopefully by the time we’re ready to wrap up this bracket, COVIT-19 will be cured and we’ll be back to watching the NHL again. Until then, we invite you to join us in killing the time in this fashion.

If you don’t feel like filling out a google form, feel free to throw your submissions in the comment section as well.