The meeting was held in a library downtown, a building that must have once seemed grand, with arcades and balustrades. Years had chipped away at the paint and masonry, and now it seemed shabby, humiliated by the gleaming office towers. When I entered, the woman behind the desk sized me up with a quick glance over the rim of her spectacles. “Downstairs,” she said, without my having said a word. She knew what I was. I’d taken care that there were no outer manifestations of my condition, but I could do nothing about my eyes, their dullness, the nearness to tears.

Down the stairs I went, past stock and boiler rooms, finally coming to a door with a sign announcing “Meeting-Private.” It was a small sign, the characters modest and humbly rendered. There was no indication of the anguish and heartbreak that lay behind the door. I took a deep breath and pushed it open. The people inside were seated in a large circle. They all turned to stare at me.

“My name is Paul,” I announced, “and I am a Toronto Maple Leafs fan.”

It was my first time, but of course they made me feel welcome. “Hello, Paul!” everyone sang out with exaggerated bonhomie.

The group leader stood, extending his arms in an inviting manner. “Welcome, Paul,” he said. “We all share your pain.”

He was a tall man, and lacked fleshiness. He wore the suggestion of a beard, wire-rimmed glasses, and spoke with a slight accent, one that I couldn’t quite place. Had we been conducting business—had he been a salesman of any sort—I certainly wouldn’t have trusted him, but he held the key to my emotional well being, so I smiled in return and took a seat.

There were perhaps a dozen people seated around me. They were a diverse group, largely male, although there were two women. One was rather hefty and looked as though she had been squashed by a great weight. The other was far more comely, in her early 20s, and seemed to contain too much energy. One leg, draped over the other, bounced a running shoe that dangled from the big toe.

The men were of various ages and backgrounds. Only a couple were distinctive. One was a man in many ways nondescript, with thinning hair and weak blue eyes, but he sported a huge walrus moustache that exploded beneath his nose and completely covered his mouth.

In the seat beside me was a young man, whom I noticed immediately, because he was naked from the waist up, and half of his exposed body—including his face—was painted a deep blue, the other half a brilliant white. He whispered “Hiya” under his breath and muttered, “I was confused…”

But the counsellor raised a finger to both silence the fellow and draw my attention. “Just as you arrived, Paul,” he said, “Bryce here was telling us his story. He was telling us how he came to be a…” The counsellor actually took a moment to sigh deeply. “A Toronto Maple Leafs fan.”