Open this photo in gallery: Toronto Maple Leafs' Oliver Ekman-Larsson rides on top of Ottawa Senators' Ridly Greig during third period NHL playoff action in Toronto, on Tuesday, April 22, 2025.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press For most of the first five periods of their opening round series, the Maple Leafs played pretty close to perfect hockey. It wasn’t just passing, scoring and saving. It was winning sneaky fights, ignoring provocations, and getting the calls. Everything that could go right for Toronto had. They fell into none of the traps that they’re famous for setting for themselves. Then Nick Robertson took a dumb high sticking penalty a million miles from his own net, and you could hear the seams begin to audibly pop. The third period turned into a Freaky Friday situation. The Senators were all over the Leafs, and all of a sudden Toronto had forgotten how to pass out of their own end. An Oliver Ekman-Larsson error - leaving the puck sitting behind his own net to be collected by no one - led to the tying goal. It probably should have ended in regulation, but Leafs’ goalie Anthony Stolarz kept the game on life support until overtime. At the moment of highest tension during the break before the fourth period, Game Ops played an interminable canned bit featuring Ekman-Larsson hooked up up to a lie detector answering questions like, “Do you think you’re a good dancer?” You can’t make the stuff this franchise does up, because they’re doing that. Four minutes later, something really wild happened - the Leafs won, 3-2. It was the Robertson/Bobby McCann/Max Domi line that saved them. Domi, who’s been something just north of awful most of the year, scored the winner. Through his bloodline, shades of battles of Ontario past. Toronto leads 2-0 in the series - something they’ve never managed in this era. Any other team in this same situation - division winners up a couple on a club who haven’t been in the post-season since forever - and you’d say it was clear skies and smooth sailing. But the Senators have managed just one complete period in this series, and it probably should be even Stephen. This could be over by the weekend, but it doesn’t feel like it will be. The difference between what’s happening now and all the past failures is Stolarz. So far, he is the goalie the Leafs have always dreamed of - one who doesn’t turn into an inflatable tube man every April. But behind him, familiar issues are beginning to come to the fore. This was a night you would have hoped for the Leafs stars to be stars. They weren’t. The Big Four were invisible after the first period. Once again, silly mistakes cost them. And again, they could not close down an opponent that was trying to roll over for them. Until that third period, Ottawa was threatening to slide into slapstick. The illustrative moment was Brady Tkachuk skating by John Tavares at the end of the first period, and accidentally-on-purpose nearly spearing the Leaf in the head. As everyone milled around angrily, you could see Tkachuk mouthing, ‘What?‘, like he had no idea what he’d done. Call this Tucker’s Law - as the Senators and Leafs play more and more, the probability of what’s happening on the ice reminding you of a bit from The Simpsons approaches one. At that point, the Ottawa team was demoralized. They couldn’t get anything going their way, and couldn’t stop anything coming back at them. But Toronto still could not put them away. There are two ways to look at this - either the Leafs have finally gotten lucky, or they are just waiting to get bent over backward by a better team. It’s still possible to believe that that better team could be Ottawa. That makes Thursday’s game in the nation’s capital far more interesting than any third game in a 2-0 series deserves to be. If the Leafs are the different team under head coach Craig Berube that they would like everyone to believe, they win that one. Not just that, but maybe Auston Matthews scores his first goal of the series. Maybe the only penalties anyone takes are the defensible kind, as opposed to the stupid kind. Maybe nobody dumps the puck behind their own net unless they are absolutely sure someone’s there to get it. If they’re the same old Leafs, they ease up knowing that they have the home-ice advantage. They let the Ottawa crowd cow them into one of their stutter starts and give up the early lead. Then when it gets time for the top two lines to save the day, both take the rest of the evening off. Maybe Stolarz lets in a couple of beach balls and everyone looks at him like it’s his fault. That would be classic Leafs. Two games down, and one thing hasn’t changed. The Leafs contain multitudes within them, but they do not contain a team that makes mistakes and also wins. They must play clean in order to beat teams or equal or greater talent. They don’t have the game breakers to contend with own goals. Not in the playoffs, at least. Not yet. By contrast, Ottawa isn’t sure what it has. Goalie Linus Ullmark was cursed for those first five periods. Neither of Toronto’s two regulation goals was shot cleanly at him, but they both went in. But by the third, Ullmark finally looked fully focused on a point right in front of him. No more sliding around the net like he’s trying to melt a hole in the ice. If he can do that for sixty minutes, the Leafs still have some work to do. Every series has a big question. Right now, the Leafs’ query - are they the team from the first hundred regulation minutes played so far? Or the last twenty?