"Unfortunate, at least in terms of athletic poetry, that it all ended as an NHL player for Mats Sundin here on the left coast.

So few Maple Leafs, even the very best, have taken their final shift with the club that Conn Smythe founded. It would have been a happy change of pace, for the franchise, for its fans, to have seen Sundin's career end in blue and white.

But that's so rare now in sports, let alone hockey. Perhaps given that Sundin started somewhere else — Quebec City — there's symmetry in the fact he ended it elsewhere as well.

But this much seems clear, almost four years after Sundin played his last game in Toronto.

Folks in the GTA must now clearly understand what they had.

And how difficult it will be to find that commodity again.

That's not to say, by the way, that the club should have moved heaven and earth to keep Sundin when his final Toronto contract expired, or paid any price. He was basically at the end of his playing days, and certainly, for a number of reasons he didn't deliver much to the Canucks in his final NHL season. "