Beach(es) Beat

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Another National Hockey League regular season is over and Toronto Maple Leafs fans have gone from imploring their heroes to "Win one for the Gipper" to hoping they will lose one for the high draft pick.

The supporters of the blue-and-white-clad stalwarts are entitled to their emotions but they think we all feel the same way, and this opinion is the result of a carefully nurtured myth.

Toronto sports lovers believe the Leafs are a national team and therefore when the club falls on hard times, a downward spiral that truth to tell started when hockey was played with a square puck, they think the rest of the country should enter a period of deep mourning.

In fact, while the Leafs may be the Air Canada Centre of the universe, the rest of this great nation cares not a fig about their travails and that is because there are more important factors at play to capture our concerns.

For instance, I see by the papers that the Royal Canadian Mint has found that 64 per cent of Canadians could not be bothered reaching into the back of a sofa to retrieve a penny they dropped.

So based on this flimsy evidence the mint meisters have concluded that Canadians don't care two cents about the one cent coin.

I differ very strongly with that finding and as proof I give you a friend of long standing named Big Teddy Wallace.

Big Teddy had four older brothers and he says by the time he was 12 years old he had bought himself a new bicycle with pennies he had salvaged from the living room sofa the mornings after his brothers had brought their girlfriends home for a cup of cocoa after the picture show.

According to him, his experience was not unique. He claims he had a friend who also had several older brothers and it took him only three months to buy a leather jacket in the same way, and another pal with six older brothers put himself through dental college with pennies he found between the cushions of the family sofa.

I believe if we get rid of the penny our language will be the poorer for it and this has nothing to do with the value of the humble coin. We have already eliminated penny dreadfuls and penny candy so my question is what is next?

Penny loafers, pennies from heaven, penny sales? A penny for your thoughts.