What can you say about Harold Ballard on today's 20th anniversary of his death?
Well, how about apologizing to the ol' curmudgeon, whom everyone but a tight circle of friends and lovers believed was the sole reason holding Toronto back from a Stanley Cup and pride in its place as Canada's most important hockey team.
If you look at all the Cups those in charge the past 20 years didn't win - who've been in power longer than H.B. by the way - maybe we were a little harsh.
‘There's Hope For The Leafs' headlined one story in April 1990, grieving for Ballard's family, mourning how dull the Toronto sports scene had just become, but predicting the hockey club would now surely emerge from the dark ages to a new era of success.
Yet two decades after his passing, there is still no Cup, the team hasn't even made the final going on 44 springs and they're now 29th of 30 NHL teams. When he went out the door of the Gardens for the final time, at least the Leafs were a .500 playoff club.
In the late 1980s, the nadir of Ballard's turbulent reign, beat writers would gather post-game in long forgotten watering holes in Bloomington, St. Louis or Winnipeg, shaking their heads after the Leafs had absorbed another one-sided whacking.
They'd lament having to cover a team that constantly lacked talent, scouting, management, communication and overall direction, tracing it all to the crank who sat grinning in his northeast corner box on game night.
There would be jokes about a fan uprising or even instigating a Gardens coup, crashing through the windows on Carlton St., rounding up and rooting out the operation like South Americans would rid themselves of an evil junta.
Pal Hal out-lived many of his detractors and succumbed to natural causes at age 86. It turned out much of his frugality to running the Leafs was not because of his cultivated image as a miser, but due to over-extending his credit in the 1970s to buy needed shares for his bold power grab.
It kept him short of cash to compete with player contracts from the World Hockey Association, to reward loyal players, expand the farm system and scouting staff or to pay his hockey staff and Gardens workers a fair wage.
"He was an easy target for everyone," said Bob Stellick, public-relations director for the Leafs in the 1980s and '90s.
"He was a flamboyant man with that orange hair, whose actions made the team interesting to follow, kind of like watching a train wreck. But operating that way wasn't the best thing from an organizational standpoint.
"He could cause a crisis for a lot of people, but if the same person had a serious illness, he'd try and get them into the Mayo Clinic. He did keep up Conn Smythe's tradition of maintaining the Gardens in great shape. People don't realize he really wanted the team to win and the sad part is he never lived to see it."
But the Cup drought since 1967 haunts today's owners as much as Ballard. His empire changed hands to the businessmen on the MLG Ltd. board who had been under his thumb, but who should have been an improvement once they called the shots.
The noble intentions of caretaker boss Donald Giffin gave way to MLG going private under Steve Stavro's old-school business approach.
Stavro initially objected to Giffin bringing in Cliff Fletcher to run the hockey office, then later forged a good working partnership with him.
But Stavro's own cash problems to solidify his control affected the on-ice product, too.
He nixed Fletcher's idea of signing Wayne Gretzky, which would have given the Leafs Mats Sundin, Doug Gilmour and the Great One down the middle, calculating the latter was not worth the cost if he couldn't fill more seats at the sold-out Gardens.
He cut Fletcher's budget at a time when the Leafs had payroll clout, before the 2005 salary cap reduced them to the same footing every other team.
So, after briefly flirting with success under Fletcher in the mid-1990s and turn of the century with Pat Quinn, the post-Ballard parade is now up to seven coaches, six general managers, countless would-be player saviours and a new-age rink, all of which have yet to yield a winner.
Where Ballard was dismissed as a dinosaur, the Canadian Steinbrenner and the last of the one-man ownership sideshows, people with a lot more brains and money have yet to succeed where he failed, with a longer turn at the wheel.
Faceless Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., created to cash in by harmonizing the Air Canada Centre, the Raptors and other sports and real-estate interests, rarely feels the love from fans.
Ticket prices are the highest in the NHL - "Mr. Ballard would have loved that," Stellick laughed - and its main shareholder, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, just declared $96.4 billion in assets in 2009, despite a $12.1-billion loss from '07.
The Leafs won't starve with such deep pockets and MLSEL does great community work, but the bottom line is no titles, from Fletcher's largesse, to Ken Dryden's dilettante dithering, mysterious Mike Smith, multi-tasking Pat Quinn, John Ferguson's rookie mistakes and now Brian Burke's blitzkrieg approach.
Unlike MLSEL's low-profile chairman Larry Tanenbaum, Ballard could not stand to see himself or the team not constantly making headlines.
If that meant making teasing sexist comments on the radio, blasting his team captain in the press or commenting on the height-challenged NHL president, it was all in a day's work and play.
And don't think Ballard wouldn't have lots to say on today's state of affairs, as he and King Clancy look out from their big bunker in the sky.