Mirtle: This Maple Leafs win was nine long years in the making for Kyle Dubas

The Maple Leafs were on the road in Florida nine years ago, in April 2014, when the franchise finally made a badly needed regime change.

In the midst of a 2-12-0 collapse to end their season, their third consecutive late-season implosion, word filtered out that Brendan Shanahan, the Hall of Fame player and NHL head office executive, would be taking over as team president.

There were long faces on the Leafs front office brass at the time, as they knew this almost certainly meant the end of their tenure with the team. And there was criticism in the media, given Shanahan was only five years removed from his playing career and had never run a team.

Three months later, Shanahan made one of his first major changes, dismissing two veteran hockey executives and hiring a then-28-year-old Kyle Dubas out of junior hockey to become one of the youngest assistant GMs in NHL history.

It was a bold choice.

“Kyle is a young executive that has made a strong name for himself in hockey with a progressive style, work ethic and maturation beyond his years,” Shanahan said at the time. “He has a fresh approach that we feel will benefit our club for years to come.”

Now, this is not a mission accomplished column. Winning one playoff round, as the Leafs finally did on Saturday night in Tampa, was hardly the goal nine years ago when Shanahan took over this organization and then hired Dubas.

It has not been a straight line of success, from there to here, either, with a lot of detours and heartbreak.

There was the disaster of 2014-15, when a promising start turned into a nightmare when they won just 11 of their final 51 games.

There was hiring Mike Babcock to a monster eight-year contract before a new general manager was in place, a marquee move that went sideways relatively quickly. (Babcock was fired after 351 games behind the bench with ugly details surfacing of what went on behind the scenes and players happy to see him go.)

There was the Lou Lamoriello era as GM, which involved a successful teardown – which in turn led to getting Auston Matthews first overall in 2016, adding a cornerstone superstar to jumpstart the rebuild – but also some significant mistakes against the salary cap and at the draft table.

Then Dubas took over as GM, five years ago.

He clashed with Babcock, almost right away, in a marriage that was doomed from the start. He worked to dump bad contracts and squeeze in bargain buys around his stars, attempting to correct some of Lamoriello’s errors.

He also made more than a few of his own.

The franchise that had already long since made epic collapses its hallmark added four more heartbreaking losses in the playoffs, again and again, first to Boston in 2019, then Columbus in 2020, Montreal in 2021 and Tampa in 2022.

Along the way, however, the young GM resisted the urge to “blow it up,” even as many in the city – and around the league, for that matter – gave up on this core group.

Dubas learned from his misfires and…