SIMMONS: This is Game 7, a place of hockey dreams and heartbreak

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In the middle of winter, when you’re taking shots on your driveway, nobody dreams about scoring the winning goal in Game 5 of a playoff series.

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It’s always Game 7.

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Usually in overtime.

The winning slapshot. Or the Kawhi series-winning basket. Or the walk-off home run in the final inning of the final game of the World Series. It’s always Game 7.

In our minds, those are our sporting dreams from the time we’re old enough to hold a hockey stick, to score that big goal, make that big hit, hit that big jumper or that monster home run and we make that crowd sound to ourselves and to our friends — because that’s what we did as kids, still do sometimes as adults and only a few of us ever got the chance for own kind for a Stanley Cup reality called Game 7.

Game 7 is a place for celebration and heartbreak, for new endings and new beginnings. It’s the best game in all of sports. It’s winner-take-all. It’s the Super Bowl without kicking off.

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And so, by proxy, the game moves from our driveway or our school yard in our minds and we’re not just taking shots on the cement, but real professional adults are doing that on the ice.

William Nylander plays with the joy of most kids when the puck is on his stick, when he can dazzle in a way only few can dazzle.

He holds your proxy and mine and all of Leafs Nation — as the kid with the opportunity now moving that driveway to the TD Garden Arena in Boston and the opportunity is there to score a goal, to win a game, to advance inexplicably to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

It’s not just Nylander, although like his friend David Pastrnak in Boston, he has a way of doing it with more style. The way Nylander scored on a breakaway in Game 6. Which would have been the perfect Toronto ending for Game 7.

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Nylander, like the injured Auston Matthews, like the inconsistent Mitch Marner, like the playoff-ready Morgan Rielly, has lived through too much Game 7 heartbreak in their time with the Maple Leafs. This is their eighth year together as a group while the rest of the Leafs team has changed around them.

They have made this trip before — four times to Game 7 — five times for a win-or-go-home series finale.

The Leafs record in those Game 7s is 0-4. The record in the final games, one of them being a best-of-five round is 0-5.

How long ago was the first series for this group against Boston, with Mike Babcock coaching Toronto? So long ago that Patrick Marleau scored twice, Travis Dermott and Kasperi Kapanen scored the other Leafs goals.

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The same teams will play Saturday night, but the rosters are so very different. And, in fairness, it hasn’t been the same for the Boston Bruins, either.

They beat the Leafs in Game 7s in 2018 and 2019, and the scores look rather one-sided in retrospect, 7-4 and 5-1.

The games, looking back, were much closer than the scores. The Leafs were tied 4-4 after two periods in 2018 and trailed 2-1 after two periods in 2019.

The top of the Toronto roster then went on to lose to Columbus in five, to Montreal in 7, followed by Tampa Bay in 7.

Game 7 may be the stuff of our dreams, but they’ve not been all that dreamy for the Leafs.

The Bruins, meanwhile, have the two Game 7 wins against the Leafs but, like the Leafs, have had no shortage of Game 7 misery. They lost in last year’s playoffs in overtime of Game 7, which is so much the talk around Boston now, after having the best season in NHL history.

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They lost in Game 7 in 2022 to Carolina. They lost the Stanley Cup in Game 7 to St. Louis in 2019. They lost in 2014 to Montreal in a seventh game, to Washington in 2012. And the big win came in 2011 when they beat the collapsing Vancouver Canucks for the Stanley Cup that year.

Those defeats never leave you — not when you’re as close as the Leafs have been from the collapse of 2013, even with a completely different team than now, to the young defeats of 2018 and 2019.

This is where the unlikely Joel Edmundson factors for the Leafs, more than anyone could have imagined for the large and somewhat immobile Toronto defenceman. He has played five Game 7s in his career: He has won all five of them.

One of those wins was against the Leafs while playing for Montreal in 2021. One of those wins was for St. Louis while beating the Bruins for the Stanley Cup in 2019.

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He fully comprehends what is is to win Game 7. Max Domi has two of those notches on his hockey belt. Ryan Reaves, who may not dress on Saturday night, was on teams that won Game 7 four different times.

This is their first time together as Maple Leafs.

They have momentum of their side if momentum means anything in a best-of-seven series. They have Bruins angst on their side. They have Joseph Woll in goal on their side. And then the puck is dropped and all the analysis, the statistical breakdowns, mean nothing.

It’s Game 7. It’s a series unto itself. It’s a kid’s dream or an adult’s nightmare.

These are the moments and the games that make careers.

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