The Maple Leafs’ loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning wasn’t as painful as in past seasons. This time, they lost to a better team.

There are a lot of names on the Toronto Maple Leafs’ postseason foe list. Most of them are Toronto Maple Leafs.

In another ill-fated Game 7 on Saturday night, they added an unlikely one: Tampa Bay’s Nicholas Paul.

Paul grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, and grew up a Leafs fan. He is one of those up-by-his-bootstraps NHLers. He has spent more professional time riding buses on the AHL than flying charters on the big ones. He is a third line guy, an energy guy.

But for one night in Toronto, Paul became Gordie Howe.

He scored two notable goals against the Leafs. The first was a muscle stab that caught Morgan Rielly looking the wrong way on a rebound. The second was a bullrush around and through TJ Brodie.

Even with Paul’s out-of-body experience, the Leafs still had endless opportunities to fix things. That’s when Tampa handed over the team’s controller to goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy. The Russian put on one of those “robot sent from the future” playoff performances that are his signature, as his teammates sat back and soaked up the pressure.

The final 10 minutes of the game looked like a drunk chasing a sober man, repeatedly trying and failing to land a punch.

It finished 2-1. Tampa goes on to play a Florida Panthers team that looks set to be picked.

The Leafs led this series 3 games to 2. For a while, in Game 6, it looked like they might find a way. They had it tied on Saturday night as well. But once again, they could not close.

That’s it. Leafs fans will now search the internet trying to find out if the number 19 is auspicious. It will be at least as many years since Toronto won a first-round series.

This time it was not as painful as the past seasons. There was no third-period meltdown or shocking howl that changed the game. Instead, the Leafs were crushed by a better, smarter team.

If available fans were anything to go by, they dully accepted another flop. No booing or tantrums. Just bovine calm. “As long as no one is ashamed”: the Leafs’ 21st century motto.

The way things go in this city with this hockey club, it wasn’t horrible. That’s the problem.

The Leafs have gone so far down their own rabbit hole that managing not to humiliate themselves qualifies as something of a victory.

The players made sure to look and sound disgusted when they walked out afterward. Auston Matthews was so downcast you would have thought he was speaking at a funeral.

But his words did not match the sad presentation.

“We are moving in the right direction,” Rielly said. “We’re getting somewhere.”

“I worked all year to get ready for these opportunities, and I think we were,” John Tavares said. “Just such a fine line.”

“We were there,” Matthews said.

Just where exactly?

The Leafs can’t wrap their head around the idea that good teams win. Almost winning doesn’t count. If you don’t win, you’re not good, by definition.

The Leafs racked up more regular season points this year than before. They have the best scorer in the game. They have no obvious holes in the list.

Given that, recent history suggests the Leafs aren’t a team on the rise. It is a team that should have already been promoted.

“I just told them they had a lot to be proud of,” coach Sheldon Keefe said afterward.

That’s what coaches do: make guys who have lost feel better about themselves. But I’m not sure that’s how the introduction to his long-running series, How We Blew It Again (Part 17), should begin.

For a while, Keefe managed to avoid tripping over the “we’re there” button. But he lets any Leaf talk long enough and he will find it.

“We are much closer than it seems,” he said.

There you go

You’re beginning to suspect that the Leafs’ main problem has nothing to do with individual talent. It is the perspective of the group.

When they feel like it, the Leafs are the swaggering alphas of the Canadian sports scene. If an alien sat through the endless hagiographic video montages that precede every home game, he’d think he was about to witness the greatest team since the Roman Empire.

But once it goes wrong again, the Leafs want to follow the Pee-Wee rules. They are looking for their participation tapes.

“This one hurts more, because this was a really good team that played hard,” Keefe said.

Oh I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that all the guys who make millions of dollars had tried. Uh, well, I guess congratulations are in order then.

The Leafs tried. They were mostly good, and occasionally very good, against an excellent team.

If the goal here is to be competitive, then good job. They did that.

If the goal is to win a Stanley Cup, they went headlong into the first hurdle. Nothing close to good enough.

Although the core is still young, each of these losses adds dog years to this team. A championship window that only opened a couple of seasons ago already feels like it’s starting to close. But the Leafs, underdogs again, keep talking like the last two weeks were their big coming out party.

When you lose one close to seven games, there will always be a good excuse. Sooner or later, or maybe never, the Leafs will realize that history will not judge you on the quality of your excuses. History only remembers teams that didn’t need such a thing.