A rare occurrence happened last weekend, as the Toronto Maple Leafs did not play a game on Saturday, January 16th. I say this is a rare occurrence because in recent seasons it has pretty much been a given that the Maple Leafs would be playing in the prime-time slot on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada.

With the Leafs mired in a 5th losing season since the lockout that should see them miss the playoffs for a team record 5 straight seasons, you would think fans would be tuning out in droves. Yet, the game that CBC showed in place of the Leafs last weekend (Ottawa visiting Montreal) scored significantly lower ratings than the CBC average featuring Leafs games, drawing less than half the regular audience at approximately 1,169,000 viewers.

Even the highly-touted first match up of the season between the league’s marquee stars, Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby, did little to dissuade people from tuning into the Maple Leafs vs the Tampa Bay Lightning, the 14th and 13th place teams in the Eastern Conference, respectively.

So we won’t tune in to the top players in the game, and we won’t tune in to an all Canadian match up featuring the most storied franchise in the history of the NHL, but throw the Blue & White on and we’re glued to our TV sets. How can this be? Are the Leafs so loved that we will watch them faithfully even after four and a half seasons of sub-par performance? Are there an equal number of Leafs haters out there that tune in just to watch them lose? Or is it the drama? Is the situation surrounding the Leafs so deliciously bad that we liken it to a guilty pleasure?

The remaining games in this Leafs season are about as meaningless as you can get. We have no hope of garnering a playoff spot, and there’s nothing to hope for by finishing last either, as we do not have a first or second round pick this year. We will likely see a lot of rookies getting more ice time as Burke tries to ship out players that aren’t in his plans for the future. Yet we still watch.

I am a long time Leafs fan, but even I am having a hard time coming up with the answer to this one. Living in Toronto I can certainly see that this city lives and breathes the Maple Leafs. We talk about them year round. We talk trades, saves, goals, wins, losses, plays, contracts, logos, schedules, free agents, the Marlies, the draft, the coaching. We even show up to watch them practice. The Maple Leafs are a religion in this town.

But that doesn’t explain the consistently high ratings in other parts of the continent as well. Are we, as Leaf fans, just gluttons for punishment? Or is our faith so devout that we will follow this team to hell and back again? It is this subculture of Toronto, and to a lesser extent, the rest of Canada, that makes being a Maple Leaf what it is. This is where the hockey spotlight shines brightest, highlighting every success, no matter how minor, and scrutinizing every mistake.

Players like Bryan McCabe and Vesa Toskala can tell you what it’s like under the microscope, as Leafs fans have managed to run McCabe out of town and Toskala will probably be happy to be packing his bags and hopping on the first plane out of here at the end of the season. On the other side of that coin are players like Doug Gilmour and Wendel Clark, who are now immortalized by that very same fan base for the brief glimpse at success and determination that they gave us.

So, no matter how this season plays out for the Blue and White, whether Kaberle, Ponikarovsky or Stajan are traded, whether we lose every game or go on a winning streak to climb back to a level of respectability, you can bet that we’ll be watching, at home, in the bars, at the Air Canada Center. We’ll keep watching, no matter how painful it gets.