The Maple Leafs’ playoff hopes will live and die with Auston Matthews

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Sometimes in life it’s not the goals you score, but how you score them.

Whether or not the Leafs won on Monday night, Auston Matthews needed to score.

If he hadn’t – again, win or lose – that was going to be the story: ‘Sixty-nine when it doesn’t matter and doughnuts when it does.’

He got his goal in the third – the winning one, as it turned out. But it wasn’t just the tally, it was the style with which it was done – a mélange of disparate skills mixed into one hockey move.

First, the pass from Max Domi. Rather than throw the puck toward a streaking Matthews in the neutral zone, Domi threw a pass, skying the puck over the middle third. That’s a lacrosse move.

Second, the awareness. Rather than stand there thinking, ‘Who’s this for? Some kid in the second row?’ – which is what any other Leaf would have done – Matthews was already moving to where the puck would end up. That’s Wayne Gretzky playing 3-D chess.

Third, the catch. Matthews pulled the puck out of the air two feet over his head while simultaneously negotiating his feet relative to the blue line. His marker, Boston’s Charlie McAvoy, was already so twisted in a mid-air spin that he needed to slap his stick blade against the ice in order to stay upright. That set up the breakaway.

Lastly, the finish. Matthews sent Linus Ullmark so far the wrong way that as he was pulling away, Ullmark was still set up to stop a shot on the short side.

So not just a great goal, or an important goal, or a memorable goal. A sort of Sports’ Greatest Hits goal – a little Tom Brady, a little Jerry Rice, a little Willie Mays and a lot of Matthews.

There were a bunch of other take-aways from Monday night. Reports of the Leafs’ demise – including in this space – are premature.

The Leafs didn’t roll the Bruins. They did something more impressive. They were their best average self against the Bruins’ best average self and still won. A blowout would have felt like a fluke. Doing it in a straight-up slapping match that was still on the edge deep into the final period felt like a shift in the tide.

The Leafs made their usual mistakes – an inexplicable Jake McCabe penalty leading to the game’s first goal stands out – and survived them.

Alongside Matthews, there were plenty of unlikely heroes up and down the Leafs lineup – Domi, John Tavares, Ilya Samsonov. Several role guys were the best version of themselves.

Which is not to say there weren’t red lights going off on other parts of the roster board. Mitch Marner remains a special case. Does he have something in his contract about getting May off? On many shifts, Marner goes down to a corner and skates around in a loop like a cab waiting to catch a fare. With William Nylander out with a cracked vertebrae or geographic tongue or a bad case of rickets or whatever it is, the Leafs can’t afford to have stars taking long weekends off.

So a lot to report, some good, some bad, but more of the former. If the Leafs were normal people, Monday was the sort of day they’d sit down to dinner and tell the family that, you know what, they had a pretty great day at work.

The beauty of a good hockey series is that the tone is reset after every game. (In a bad hockey series, one team does the beating, the other team takes it and the tone is a steady, embarrassed silence.)

Right now, on an off-day Tuesday, the tone is, ‘How much does Auston Matthews want this?’

The Leafs are not going to beat the Bruins as a collective because too many Bruins want it and – this is the important part – know how to get it. But if Matthews wants it, he may be able to get it by himself.

Anyone who pays attention knows the Leafs don’t have a team. At least, they don’t have a team the way the Vegas Golden Knights or the Bruins have a team – three good lines, each of which is capable of being great on a given night. Vegas became champions because of its all-roundedness.

Everybody keeps telling the Leafs they are too much the other way – top heavy with talent, flimsy to featherlight the further down the bench you get.

Then in the next sentence, they tell the Leafs they need to be more like the Knights, more spread out and equally dangerous on every shift. As if David Kampf is going to turn into Nikita Kucherov just because all of Toronto would like him to.

It seems to me that if the Leafs are going to win, they need to play to their strength. Their biggest strength is Matthews. Not Marner and/or Nylander and/or Tavares and/or Morgan Rielly and Matthews. Just Matthews.

He is the only Leaf with greatness in him. After eight years of observation, that should be obvious. The rest of the guys on that list are good players, but the point at which any of them might make a case to enter the pantheon is already past.

So is Matthews feeling lucky? Can he turn this series not only into a 200-foot racetrack, but one that extends eight feet above the ice as well? Can he play the way he played Monday – creating all of the Leafs goals – every night? Can he win this thing on his own?

If you think that’s an unreasonable expectation, you’ve been watching Toronto hockey for too long. The definition of sports greatness is repeatedly doing things no one has the right to expect you to do, and doing them so regularly that people start to take it for granted.

No Leaf has hit that bar in 50 years. Maybe Matthews is ready to give it a go.