'Pinch me': Why Steven Lorentz and the Maple Leafs are a good mix

TORONTO — You can fill that sucker with all the Clamato and vodka and Worcestershire sauce and celery sticks the party can handle. But you cannot edge the Stanley Cup with lemon and spices to complete the championship Caesar experience, it turns out.

The keepers won't allow it. That's where they draw the line.

"I asked if we could put, like, the rimmer on it. They said, 'No, you can't rim the Cup,' " says a smiling Steven Lorentz, who may not have stopped smiling since his final night as a Florida Panther.

"It's a sacred trophy."

These are the things you learn when you become a champion and spend a summer day with the world's greatest drinking vessel and, for the Kitchener-Waterloo native, early Oktoberfest centrepiece.

"I got some German roots. So, we ate sausage and sauerkraut out of it," Lorentz adds.

Just an hour's drive west from his hopeful new NHL home, the depth forward grinded through his 16-hour day with Lord Stanley, spreading joy to the cancer ward of the children's hospital, where he knows current and former patients; hitting up his local gym to prove what training can bring; welcoming the town to his boyhood Waterloo rink, RIM Park, for a few hours; then guzzling rim-free libations from a 34-pound chalice till midnight with friends and family in his fiancée's backyard.

"You feel it in your back at the end of it," Lorentz admits during a training-camp chat outside the Toronto Maple Leafs' practice facility, where he's been striving to make the opening night roster.

"The Cup's heavy. Like, you're using your knee to throw it up. It was quite the day. But it's worth being sore for a week after lifting it all day and giving people drinks out of it."

Lorentz, 28, is easygoing, chatty, and instantly likeable. He's an affable conversationalist seemingly free of the nerves one might expect from a seventh-round pick and fringe fourth-liner playing hockey without a contract.

If there is a juxtaposition bubbling here, that's because Lorentz has been living one since the horn sounded on Game 7.

Lorentz — an eight-season pro, three-league, six-team journeyman — can't describe what it feels like to win the Cup, but that doesn't prevent him from attempting. It's all a blur, he says, yet he remembers "that night clear as day."

Most indelible are the faces in crowding the Cats' locker room as beer sprayed like Champagne and hugs flowed like wine.

"Not just the players, but the family and friends that come in, and the management and their families and stuff. It just shows you how many people it takes to do something like that," Lorentz marvels.

"And we wouldn't be there without any of them. All those people in that room, they did their fair share to get the job done. So, it would be quite special to do something like that in this city here."

Yes, Lorentz had other offers. He could have signed elsewhere for more money and better security in free agency. But the Ontario-born dreamer took a flyer — a PTO with a cap-tight, winger-heavy roster — for a chance to repeat.

This time with the team he grew up worshipping as a kid westbound on the 401.

On Day 1 of camp, Lorentz obtained a photo of himself in a Maple Leafs sweater and fired it off to his father, Mark.

"My God, that's just too cool," Dad responded.

"I've never worn blue and white in my life," Lorentz goes on. "I'm looking in the mirror like... pinch me. You know, I had my Sundin jersey, I had my Curtis Joseph jersey, all that stuff growing up. And now my jersey's got LORENTZ on it. So, it's pretty special."

If Lorentz sounds like a man who's making the cut, that's because we suspect he will.

Despite suffering a minor upper-body ailment in the first week of camp, the six-foot-four, 216-pounder has been practising as a mainstay on centre David Kämpf's fourth unit, and GM Brad Treliving is very targeted with his PTOs. (Noah Gregor was essentially a sure thing last fall, and Max Pacioretty's agent has already made it public that a contract is forthcoming.)

The message Lorentz received upon accepting the invite: Don't change a thing.

So, he's been commuting daily from his folks' place in Waterloo to camp in Etobicoke with the goal of flipping his autumn audition into a Toronto winter home of his own.

"It's not always about taking the best players, but taking the right players," Lorentz says.

"To build a winning team, seeing what I saw last year, it's guys that bring what they do best, and it's not trying to go and do too much. You know, I'm not going to go out there and try to score 50 goals this year. We got guys on the roster that can do stuff like that."

What Lorentz vows to do is whatever coach Craig Berube asks. He already has a firm grasp of what that'll be.

"Check hard. Play defence. Be good on the penalty kill. And just bring that energy. That's what I've been doing, and that's how I've had success in my NHL career so far," Lorentz says.

"The simpler I play, the better. Just fly under the radar and do the right things on both sides of the puck."

Within 15 hours after the Panthers wrapped their championship parade down A1A (Beachfront Avenue!), half a dozen of them were free agents, scattering like seashells.

Another paradox: Just as Lorentz became bonded for life with his teammates, they were no longer together (Maple Leafs signee Oliver Ekman-Larsson notwithstanding).

"We knew it was coming. It's just tough, because you don't really get a lot of time to think about those pending free agents, where you're going to be next year. It's a lot of thought that goes into it, like families and stuff. So, it was weird," Lorentz says. Another smile: "But we're all happy. We're all still champions, right? Can't take that from us."

Lorentz reveals that "a bunch of teams" expressed interest in signing the speedy left shot to improve their PK and help tilt the ice on D-zone starts.

However, after doing his homework on the Leafs' culture and coaching staff, touring the Ford Performance Centre, and speaking with Berube and Treliving, the player's choice became clear. Geography and the romance of playing for the laundry he used to cheer for didn't hurt.

"I'm not a guy who's just going to jump on the first offer and the most amount of money. I want to be in the right spot, a team that I believe is going to do well," Lorentz says.

"I thought for a few years now that my game could kind of suit well in this system, especially with the top-level talent in the top lines. I thought I could come in and use my size and my speed and carve out an identity in the bottom six.

"Just watching this team over the years, it's frustrating seeing the potential they have and then it just seems like they come up short. Which is unfortunate, because there's a little kid in me that still wants them to do well and hoist that Cup, right? So, it was a no-brainer when I came down here at the end of summer and did a little walk through the facilities."

On Lorentz's right quadriceps walking through Leafs HQ is tattooed an outline of the Stanley Cup — a forever reminder of the 2024 glory, the indelible blur, and the most delicious Caesar in Waterloo (lack of rimmer be damned).

Lorentz is quick to joke that he has two legs for a reason.

Yet before he and the Maple Leafs can begin sketching plans for the blank canvas that is his left quad, Lorentz needs to put that ink on a new contract.