The season’s over. The ship has sailed.

Look forward to the draft, look forward to your summer vacation, look forward to your crazy friend’s birthday month.

But despite an ugly ending, it was still a pretty fun year.

So we asked our staff: what’s your biggest positive from this season?

My biggest positive takeaway is that the Leafs aren’t the Oilers. The team didn’t have success in 2016-17 off a number of unrepeatable career years, this is a team that is developing towards something great and will improve given the opportunity. The biggest part of that was probably that the Leafs still have some system depth left in the form of Kapanen, Dermott, Johnsson, and Borgman. The optimist in me would have seen maybe one of them panning out, but Kapanen, Dermott, and Johnsson could be key pieces in future Leafs success, and Borgman looks perfecting capable of resuming a regular NHL shift next season. This looks like it will be a team that’s good for a while, and that’s encouraging.

Similar to a lot of people, my biggest positive is how much this team has improved and will keep on improving for years to come. This management isn’t stupid and they won’t be making any panic trades to try to win when our core is here for cheap. They are patient and I love it. From this season, we have also learned and pretty much 100% confirmed where this team’s weakness is. For multiple years now it has been our defense and with offense and goaltending working around it, it makes the job easy to fix.

Honestly? It might be that Mitch Marner showed that he’s an absolute monster when he’s healthy. We all know his season didn’t get off to the greatest start, but he went on a complete tear over the second half of the year and continued it into the playoffs. There was concern early on that maybe he’d taken a step back, but once he went into screw-you mode he added another gear to the team.

My biggest positive from this season is that our depth has become a lot better than it appeared at the beginning of the year. I remember doing prospect rankings and I wasn’t sure how the Leafs prospects would pan out, but the graduation of Kapanen, Johnsson, and Dermott, the success of the Marlies, especially Sparks, and the easy transitions for Grundstrom, Liljegren, Engvall, etc. The Leafs may have taken a step forward this year, but the success of the Marlies means they can continue to take steps forward, especially in the wake of the UFAs we’re about to lose.