Leaf season

 The Toronto Maple Leafs won a playoff series last night for the first time since 2004, which goes to show no one can be a schmuck all the time. Also, if you give a guy enough chances, sooner or later he's gonna get it right.

I say this because for six seasons in a row, the Leafs screwed around and lost in the first round. They lost 11 straight elimination games until last night. Last year, memorably, they blew a 3-2 series lead against Tampa Bay, falling in overtime in Tampa in Game 6 and then losing Game 7 at home, 4-3.

This year they beat the Lightning in six games, winning three games in overtime and wrapping it up with a 2-1 win last night. And you can bet they partied like was 2004 in Toronto last night.

2004! Remember that?

"Isn't that the year we found out we hadn't actually won the war in Iraq, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

Yes! It was. It was also the year George W. Bush, the architect of that mess, won a second term. And the year the Patriots won the Super Bowl again. And the year the Pistons upset the Lakers to win the NBA title ... and the year the Red Sox won the World Series and ended 86 years of tort-cha, absolute tort-cha ... and the year Buddy Rice (remember him?) won the Indianapolis 500 and celebrated indoors because a massive thunderstorm rolled over the Speedway and a tornado touched down a couple of miles south.

So, yeah, a long damn time ago, and that it happened to one of the Original Six made it worse. Somewhere Dave Keon and Frank Mahovlich and Syl Apps and Tim Horton must have been hollering and throwing things every time the Leafs blew it the last 19 years.

Well, not today, boys and girls. Today, one of the most decorated franchises in NHL history finally brought it home.

For now.

"Shaddap!" Turk Broda just snarled.

Drafting by volume

 I never had much luck with baseball cards.

Just about every one I got when I was a kid was an immediate candidate for my bicycle spokes. No Koufaxes, Kalines or Clementes for me. No, sir. But I cornered the market on Gary Bells, Chico Salmons and Orlando Penas, so I had that going for me.

I'm guessing Indianapolis Colts GM Chris Ballard would have thought that was fabulous.

This upon learning the Colts have collected a lot of potential Bells, Salmons and Penas in this man's NFL Draft, which makes today a busy day for them. They'll will have two fourth-round picks, FOUR fifth-round picks and two picks in the seventh and final round.

Call it drafting by volume, and it's sort of Ballard's deal. Sometimes it even works.

Most times, though ...

Well. I may be a tad skeptical, but I don't see how "Let's bring in a bunch of lower-round guys and see if any of 'em can play" is a blueprint for future Super Bowls. I look at the six fifth- and seventh-round picks in particular, and all I see are six guys who are going to be going home sometime during training camp.

Yeah, maybe the Horsies will get lucky with one or two. Teams do. But what's the point of accumulating picks you know aren't going to pan out for the most part? Why not, I don't know, accumulate second- and third-round picks instead?

Hey, look, kids, here's an offensive tackle from Tech State! And a safety from Western Hog Waller U.! And this GEM of a linebacker who somehow fell all the way to the seventh round! Collect 'em all!

And the Colts will, apparently.

And Ballard will look like a genius if two or three of 'em turn out to be value picks and not just candidates for the bicycle spokes.

They might not deserve that fate. But, hell, neither did Chico Salmon.

A roll of the dice

 So, then: Anthony Richardson.

Off-the-charts athlete. Leaps tall buildings in a single bound, all that. If the NFL were the Olympic decathlon, the Indianapolis Colts just won gold.

Except ...

Except the NFL is not the Olympic decathlon.

Which means the Colts are asking Richardson to play quarterback.

And no one really knows yet if he can do it. 

At least, not in the National Football League, although the Colts are betting he can. Scratch that: They're praying he can. That especially includes GM Chris Ballard, who's hanging his job and his reputation on Anthony Richardson.

He might have just selected the next great Colts quarterback, the way the Horsies picked Andrew Luck and Peyton Manning and even Bert Jones way back in the day. Or he might have just selected a hell of a free safety.

Truth is, we don't really know, which means the Colts were either very bold to take him at No. 4 or completely reckless. There's the thinnest of lines between the two, and we won't really know which side of it the Colts landed on for awhile yet.

Right now, all we've got to go on is what he did at Florida last fall in his only season as a full-time starter, and the numbers don't blow your hair back. He completed 53.8 percent of his passes for 2,549 yards, 17 touchdowns and nine interceptions. He also rushed for 654 yards and nine more scores -- and, at 6-4 and 244 Adonis-like pounds, he'll be both agile enough and ripped enough to survive behind the Colts' Seven Blocks of Parmesan Cheese O-line.

He flashed enormous promise at times. He also made some of the mistakes a guy makes who's still learning the position. He looked like what he is, a stunningly gifted athlete playing quarterback.

So will he become a quarterback playing quarterback? Patrick Mahomes 2.0, or even Lamar Jackson 2.0?

We shall see. But as last night's first round of the draft proved, these things never go the way you think they're gonna go.

First the Houston Texans won the draft in the first half hour by taking C.J. Stroud with the second pick and trading with Arizona for the third pick so they could take Alabama edge rusher Will Anderson.

Then the draft gurus who kept telling us the running back position is devalued in the modern NFL watched two RBs get taken in the first 12 picks -- Bijan Robinson by the Falcons at No. 8, and Alabama's Jahmyr Gibbs by the Lions at No. 12.

The Bears sat tight and let the Eagles jump them to take Jalen Carter, the peerless edge rusher from Georgia whose draft status was supposedly hurt badly by a couple of errors in judgment, but who still went ninth. O-linemen were popular early. The Patriots may have gotten the steal of the draft by snagging corner Christian Gonzalez with the 17th pick.

Oh, yeah: And Kentucky quarterback Will Levis, who was getting some late run from the gurus as a potential No. 2 pick, fell all the way out of the first round. He'll likely go in the second round tonight.

Once again: You never know.

Which, if you're a Colts fan, means you're saying one of two things this morning:

"Hey, you never know!" is one.

"Omigod, you never know!" is the other.

The long way home

The best story in sports last night was not Jimmy Butler wrestling the  top-seeded Milwaukee Bucks to the ground and taking their season away, or the upstart Seattle Kraken beating the Colorado Avalanche in the Avalanche's barn to take a 3-2 series lead, or even the Golden State Warriors doing Golden State things to steal a win on the road in their nail-biting playoff series with Sacramento.

It was a pinch-hitter striking out in Pittsburgh.

("Oh for God's sake. Not your stupid Pirates AGAIN!" you just said)

Yes, but ... not really.

Not really, because this could have happened anywhere in baseball, except for the fact it never does. What happened was, a career minor-leaguer named Drew Maggi pinch-hit for Andrew McCutchen in the eighth inning of the Cruds' 8-1 shellacking of the Dodgers, and he got ... a standing ovation.

Heck, the ump even let him soak it in.

This is because that one at-bat was the last stop on a long journey for Maggi, who'll turn 34 years old next month. He began playing professional baseball in 2010 after the Pirates drafted him in the 15th round out of Arizona State, and a lot of bus rides in a lot of places have happened for Maggi in the 13 minor-league summers and 1,155 minor-league games since.

He's been a Lehigh Valley IronPig. A St. Paul Saint. An Arkansas Traveler and a Tulsa Driller and an Oklahoma City Dodger and, until he got the Call this week, an Altoona Curve. He's been in the bushes for the Pirates and the Angels and the Dodgers and the Twins and the Phillies, and the Pirates again.

He got called up once by the Twins but never played. Got an invite from the Indians in 2018 but was immediately dumped after testing positive for amphetamines and drawing a 50-game suspension -- something of a joke considering how many major-leaguers in the '60s, '70s and '80s used to gobble what they called "greenies" like M&Ms.  

All of it culminated in last night, when he stepped to the plate in PNC Park and took his swings in a major-league game for the first time ever.

Yeah, he struck out. But after 13 years and almost 4,500 plate appearances in the minors, plate appearance No. 1 in the majors will undoubtedly be the plate appearance he'll always remember.

"Anything is possible. Never give up," he said when it was done. "If you love something, go for it."

Even if the way home is the long way.

One lovely facial

 And now the goal of the Stanley Cup playoffs so far, which might be the goal of the year when it's all said and done because it was a perfect deflection imperfectly achieved.

Also a whale of an owie, if in this case a useful one.

"The hell are you talking about, Mr. Blob?" you're saying now.

I'm talking about Zach Hyman of the Edmonton Oilers, who scored a goal last night in the Oilers 6-3 win over the Los Angeles Kings.

Scored a goal ... with his face.

I mean, check this out. Is that sticking your nose in there, or what?

And here the Blob imagines this exchange between Kings goalie Pheonix Copley and Oilers D-man Evan Bouchard, who took the shot that caromed neatly into the goal off Hyman's mug ...

"Wait, you mean that COUNTS?" 

"Sure it does! Planned it all the way, dude." 

"Yeah, but you didn't call bank!" 

"Did so!" 

"Did not!"

At which point, of course, a dazed Hyman skates past.

"Why does my face hurt?"

A-Jetsing they will go

 Aaron Rodgers is finally a New York Jet, just like Brett Favre before him, and there is the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in Green Bay, where he won a Super Bowl and became an icon just like Favre did. Thus the rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth, and the shedding of enough tears to make the Fox River overflow its banks.

Just kidding. The only thing making the Fox jump its banks in Green Bay this morning is likely champagne, because the Packers finally shed a massive pain in their ass and fleeced the Jets in the bargain.

That Rodgers is one of the best quarterbacks of his generation is indisputable, but he's also a weirdo and a drama queen and a world champion complainer. The latter was tolerable as long as he wasn't 39 years old and entering the sunset years of his career. But now that he is?

Well. Both parties were sick of one another, is what it boils down to. And so off he goes to New York, and the celebration is on in Green Bay because in offloading him to the Jets the Jets Jets-ed it up as usual.

"But ... but we got AARON RODGERS!" Jets fans are saying now.

True. But you gave up your first, third and sixth-round pick in Thursday's NFL Draft for him, plus a conditional second-round pick in next year's draft that becomes a first-round pick in next year's draft if Rodgers plays 65 percent of the Jets snaps this season. Which he is almost certain to do.

That's a lot to give up for a guy who's essentially a rental, given that Rodgers will turn 40 before the season is over and realistically will not be the QB he was at 30.

The Jets, of course, are betting he has enough left in his arm to get them to the Super Bowl, just like Tom Brady got Tampa Bay to the Super Bowl. Difference is, Brady had already gotten his teams to nine Super Bowls (with six rings) before he took the Buccaneers home in 2021. Rodgers, in 18 seasons, has gotten his teams to ... one.

So for four draft picks, half of them likely first-rounders, the Jets get an aging superstar who's closed the deal all of one time in his career. And that was 12 years ago .

Maybe it will work. Or maybe the Jets have gone a-Jetsing again, and this will be the worst deal since that Swedish knob on "Succession" slicked the idiot Roy boys out of their daddy's business empire and made 'em think they won.

(Sorry for the spoiler, if you haven't seen it yet.)

(Although the real spoiler might be awaiting Jets fans.)

Geezer power

 Poor Dillon Brooks. He thought he was being all brave and what-not when he called LeBron James "old" and got all Yeah, I said it, explaining he did so because he likes to "poke bears". It's fun, y'all!

Meanwhile Old LeBron just shook his head and probably chuckled a bit because he's seen this movie a million times with a million other wannabes, and so he knew how it was going to play out in the last reel.

How it's played out is this:

* With the series between LeBron's Lakers and Brooks' Memphis Grizzlies tied at one win apiece, Brooks was ejected for punching LeBron in the junk in Game 3 and LeBron went on to put up 25 points, nine rebounds and five assists in a 111-101 Lakers win.

* Then, in Game 4 last night, LeBron became the oldest player in NBA history ever to put up a 20-20 stat line -- 20 points, 20 boards -- and made the overtime-forcing layup and then a crucial and-one in overtime as the Lake Show went up 3-1 in the series.

He also blocked a couple of shots, doing the Dikembe Mutombo finger-wag when he did, And dished seven dimes. And played 45 minutes.

And the old bear-poker, Brooks?

He's the guy LeBron took to the tin to draw the foul on the and-one.

Brooks finished with 11 points on 4-of-11 shooting. In the two games since he shot off his mouth about old guys, he's 0-2 against the Old Guy, and Old Guy has abused him for 45 points, 29 rebounds, a dozen assists, three blocked shots and a steal.

So maybe now poor Dillon gets it, as have so many before him: You don't mess with geezers. They've seen you before, they know what you're bringing, and they're always three or four jumps ahead of you.

Thus endeth the lesson.