Three weeks in a row. Don't call it a comeback! It may be a day late (or two if you go to bed at a reasonable hour), but it's here.

Shoot, I definitely had something in mind to write about but can't remember..........

Oh. Wow. I got it. That doesn't happen often.

This past week marked the NHL's trade deadline. That means teams will head into the upcoming playoffs with the players currently on the roster. That means everyone is releasing their projections and writing the storylines of what is to come

And their arrogance is unbearable.

It's a writer's job to write—I get that. They have to have AN opinion on how a team is going to perform. They have to act as though they're opinion is valid. Beyond valid: it's grounded in fact and surely must be true.

"The Leafs aren't built for the playoffs. Their team is too soft. They crumple under pressure. They don't have the will to push through adversity. When the going get's tough, they go golfing."

Everyone conveniently forgets that hockey is one of the world's most random sports; the NHL has more parity than any other league in North America. The best odds any one team has of winning a playoff matchup is around 65%. Most are coin flips.

Look at the Leafs—the league's biggest chokers: in three of the last five years, they were the underdogs; in four of those five, they went to a final tie-breaking game; and along the way, over a dozen of their games went to overtime where one goal was the difference between them moving on and continuing this "cursed" story. One shot that--had it been one inch to the left--would have gone post-and-in. One good bounce off the end-boards; one fewer mental lapses from a rookie; one save on a nothing shot.

Just change one teeny tiny thing, and this entire storyline dies.

But randomness and bad luck are boring stories. We need to make sense of the chaos. We need a through line. We need one explanation that accounts for everything that happened.

So people cherry pick. It's couldn't be a combination of bad line-matching, debilitating injuries, brain farts, clutch opponent performances, bad officiating, and underperforming superstars. It's gotta just be the last one. That story's way more grabby:

The fashion-forward twenty-three year old who hangs out with Justin Bieber doesn't have the "old school hockey mentality" that it takes to win. It's his fault. (Him and the other kid, at least.

If you bring up allllll the other things that happened, the opinionated writer (and the ten-thousand fans who follow them) will say, "it doesn't matter that X, Y, Z, and W all happened; winner's overcome it."

That's a fun and transparent way to stick your head in the sand and maintain your over-simplified storyline.

Did you know: more than one thing can be true! There can be multiple, compounding factors that lead to a result

We want to wrap the world up into nice, tidy stories tied off with bows--line up a series of events and draw one clear line. Find a pattern, breathe easy. When things make sense, we sleep better.

We do it with these silly sports stories. We do it with conspiracy theories. We do it in politics. We're doing it with COVID.

We do it when asking "what's wrong with that guy." We do it when we look back at our own choices.

I do it. And I wish it were that easy. To have only one thing standing between me and the book I'm writing? To find one lonely reason I'm single? To figure out one cure for my sore back?

It'd be a lot easier to fix problems if they only had one cause.

But they don't, and trying to pin them down on an over-simplified "A creates B" narrative doesn't solve anything. It's natural and understandable, but it's lazy.

I get more frustrated by the Leaf talk than I should. But I see it as a microcosm for all the other things. Letting that type of thinking percolate in one area of our lives normalizes it. Cognitive biases and logical failures are contagious

So this is a hill I'm dying on. It's dumb--and yet I do think it's strangely important. Practice better thinking when the stakes are low and it's all nonsense, and you're more likely to think better when it counts.

That's the moral of the day.

…that and #Leafs2022Champs