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There is only one conclusion to draw about the Toronto Maple Leafs so far this season – they are cursed.

How else to explain all those losses? Mediocre goaltending, bad penalty killing and scoring-averse forwards are explanations for only so much.

I mean, Hal Gill scored on them for crying out loud. He scores once every two months and there he was bouncing a shot off not one but two Leafs defencemen during the Montreal Canadiens’ 5-4 shootout win on Saturday.

Then there was the shot that went off the shinpads of Canadiens’ defenceman Roman Hamrlik and into the net.

Okay, Vesa Toskala was in goal for the Leafs. And he did let in his usual soft goal. But this is still the stuff of black magic.

Even if Phil Kessel makes his long-awaited debut for the Leafs tomorrow night against the Tampa Bay Lightning it might not be enough to change the Leafs’ fortunes.

“Phil hasn’t played in six months,” head coach Ron Wilson said. “I know everybody is going to think he’ll score six goals in the first night.

“I don’t expect that of him if he does play [tomorrow]. He hasn’t even had an exhibition game. He’s way behind the eight ball. We’ll be patient when he does play.”

On paper, though, it looks like Kessel, who had a long recovery from shoulder surgery, could make a difference. Last season, he scored 36 goals for the Boston Bruins in 70 games. That is 0.51 goals per game. In their last three games, the Leafs lost two in overtime and one in a shootout. With Kessel around, the Leafs would have had 1.53 more goals, which should have been enough to win perhaps two of those games, even if regular readers know my math is suspect.

But let’s go back to the curse theory. It makes sense because there is a long tradition of curses in hockey. What else would you call the reign of Harold Ballard?

The most famous NHL curse was the one allegedly put on the Chicago Blackhawks, which has a connection to the Leafs. Word of the Curse of the Muldoon first surfaced in the late 1950s in this newspaper.

Jim Coleman, the legendary newspaperman who died in 2001, was trying to explain why the Blackhawks were going to lose in the playoffs to the Maple Leafs and the usual unforgiving deadline was approaching.

It was the Curse of the Muldoon, Coleman wrote. Pete Muldoon was the coach of the Blackhawks for part of the 1926-27 season. The ‘Hawks owner in those days was an eccentric millionaire, Major Frederic McLaughlin, who was every bit as inept an owner as Ballard would be 50 years later with the Leafs.

Like Ballard, McLaughlin always blamed someone else for his follies, usually his coaches, who had short shelf lives. According to Coleman, after McLaughlin fired him in the middle of the 1926-27 season, Muldoon shook his fist at the owner and yelled, “As long as you live, you’ll never win another Stanley Cup. It’s the Curse of the Muldoon!”

Well, yes, it was a fabrication by Coleman in order to meet his deadline. But the Blackhawks did not win a Cup until 1961. By then, McLaughlin was long gone and the Blackhawks were in the hands of the Wirtz family. Given how Bill Wirtz ran the team after 1961 until he passed on a few years ago, it was not surprising that Coleman’s fable came to be accepted as fact by many hockey fans.

The struggles of the Leafs, plus the fact they have not won a Stanley Cup since 1967, make it reasonable to assume there is a curse. The question is who placed it on them, since there is no shortage of candidates who were mistreated by the team.

If you want to stay with the Irish theme, there is Pat Quinn. He took the Leafs to two conference finals during his eight-seasons from 1998 to 2006 and was rewarded with a pink slip the first time he missed the playoffs. Or it could even be the man who gave Quinn the axe, John Ferguson, who was clipped himself in 2008.

Maybe it was Mike Smith or Ken Dryden. Smith was the de facto GM until Dryden got him fired in 1998 after some political knife-fighting with the board of directors. Dryden was eventually marginalized by the board and then quit in 2004 to become a politician, having learned the ropes in that field with his treatment of Smith.