Maple Leafs playing risky game of hide and seek with their fans at Scotiabank Arena

The Maple Leafs were 10 minutes away from one of their most ignominious home exits in recent Scotiabank Arena memory.

On a Tuesday, when the heat was on their underwhelming stars to show up, the visiting Blackhawks missing Connor Bedard and the feel-good atmosphere of a Joe Bowen retirement salute to start with, they were two and a half periods into laying a double-yolk egg in front of 18,568 fans.

The booing, perceptible as they fell behind on two bad goals in the first period, was sparking in all corners of the rink as the third frame wore on. But two of the main targets, Auston Matthews and William Nylander, factored heavily in the two goals that followed to tie.

Nylander’s second effort behind the net to poke a puck free found Matthews for a power-play strike. Instead of his usual bow-and-arrow celly, the captain skated to the glass, looked up and cupped his ear as if to state “what’d ya think of that?”

“Just excitement, all in the moment,” Matthews said of his gesture. “The boos were coming down and rightly so, but after that first goal (he and Nylander winning it back to Oliver Ekman-Larsson) the crowd really got into and after the second one, the place was rocking.”

Matthews was at the top of the masthead when coach Craig Berube said a couple of days earlier how team leadership was culpable in two third-period Bay Street letdowns to San Jose and Edmonton.

Tuesday’s comeback in a game that should’ve been much easier given the circumstances on a wave of emotion doesn’t paper over all the Leafs’ home woes, already frittering much of their October advantage on the NHL schedule.

Before dramatically turning it around Tuesday, the Leafs were about to finish their first 20 home dates without at least 10 wins for the first time since 2015-16. That was the forgettable year of finishing at the bottom to get the Matthews’ lottery ticket and the most recent year they missed the playoffs — which still is a very real possibility now.

Despite a couple of Leafs vowing Tuesday morning that it was time to grind out boring points and not worry about crowd pleasing, it was exactly one of those derring-do plays that cost them a fourth short-handed goal against, among the most in the league. Nylander tried to alley-oop a puck that was quickly gobbled up and sent south.

Berube already was steaming about a number of mistakes and the crowd was giving the team no mercy, the in-house music trying to drown out the catcalls.

“No surprise there,” said winger Dakota Joshua, who had the winning goal eight seconds after Matthews scored. “If I was a fan, I wouldn’t be too happy with the performance either.

“They have every right (to jeer) with what we putting out there. Nice to pull that out for them. We knew if we played our game, we could come back.”

It seemed Bowen’s special morning speech in the dressing room had little effect on his team, nor after his symbolic opening faceoff when the 74-year-old high-fived the bench after the standing ovation for his tribute video.

Just like his first Leafs radio broadcast 44 years ago at Chicago Stadium, the Leafs fell behind early before scoring three to tie.

And history all but repeated itself, this time with youngest son David at the mic as Joe took the night off, Toronto once more bagging three late tallies.

lhornby@postmedia.com

X: @sunhornby