Well, They Finally Did It!

 

I'm starting the KKP articles for the final day of April 2023 from a different angle due to a significant event in our city last night. I've often spoken about my hometown of Toronto in the blog and a lot of it admittedly has been about the weather because I believe that the largest city in Canada has had some very wacky meteorological phenomena to make weathercasters around the world swoon. However, sports is not a big thing with me usually and in this city, hockey is all. It's kinda like the love that Osakans have for their baseball Hanshin Tigers. No matter how often the Tigers lose, the folks there will always have their backs. And for the fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, it's been a long winter of discontent with many years of not making the playoffs and then after finally getting some elite talent on the team several years ago, they inconceivably couldn't get past the first round of the playoffs. Decades ago, when the hockey team was in another losing funk, there was the expression "Toronto is the only place on Earth where the Leafs fall in spring". Ouch!

Well, some of the monkey finally came off all of our backs last night. For the time since the spring of 2004, the Leafs finally won a playoff round in dramatic fashion. They won it in a low-scoring affair in overtime. There was supposed to have been a planned power outage in a huge area of the province of Ontario last night but the electric company promised that if there were overtime, it would hold off on the outage. I'm sure that it kept the promise. It's the Leafs, after all.

Players, coaches, and fans went berserk. It felt as if the Leafs won the Stanley Cup championship instead of just a mere opening round. But then again, a man who had been dying of thirst getting those precious gulps of water would taste them as some of the sweetest wine ever produced. For the journalistic angle in the past several hours, the reporters have been openly wondering what was happening out in the world when the Leafs had won their previous playoff round nineteen years ago.

Facebook was launched in February.

"Kill Bill, Vol. 2" was No. 1 at the box office during the week of April 18th 2004. And as for the Japanese music scene, I have a few things to add.

Hinano Kamimura（上村ひなの）of Hinatazaka 46（日向坂46）was born on April 12th that year.

The aidoru group Berryz Kobo（Berryz工房）would make its debut in January 2004 although the above is one of their later singles, "cha cha SING".

J-Pop crooner Ken Hirai（平井堅）released his April 28th 2004 single "Hitomi wo Tojite"（瞳をとじて）which would eventually become the No. 1 single of the year.

In any case, many congratulations to the team and their fans. I can only hope that I will be inspired to write about what happened in the spring of 1967 in several weeks' time since it was 56 years ago that the Leafs had last won the Stanley Cup. Maybe I had learned how to walk by then.