"The Maple Leafs should have marched out of the Air Canada Centre right behind the 48th Highlanders when the opening ceremony ended last night.

Fresh off a surprising 3-2 win over the defending Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings on Thursday at Joe Louis Arena, the Leafs returned home and laid an egg the size of Etobicoke.

They had a couple of chances early, but after failing to capitalize, completely fell apart, dropping the regular season home opener, 6-1, to the fleet and creative Montreal Canadiens.

"You can't have four or five guys not play hard when you play a great team like that," a sombre Toronto head coach Ron Wilson said. "We had everybody going the other night (in Detroit) and for whatever reason, first-night jitters at home, whatever you can think of, it just wasn't there (last night). We had to be as ready as we were against Detroit, and we weren't."

The euphoria from the Detroit win disappeared as quickly as a bag of peanuts on an Air Canada flight. Montreal jumped ahead 2-0 after the opening period and 6-1 after two. Too many Canadiens goals were the result of ill-timed Toronto penalties, along with weak coverage in front of goaltender Vesa Toskala -- who mercifully was pulled at the start of the third for Curtis Joseph.

Forward Alex Steen said the loss clearly demonstrated that the rebuilding Leafs will not win a lot of games if they don't play disciplined hockey.

"We've got to get in their face a little bit more, the forecheck wasn't as good, because we were one step behind them," Steen said. "It is important for us to see how hard we have to work night in and night out and we have to compete every night in order to play against teams like Detroit and Montreal."

Two of Montreal's goals, and the two yielded in Detroit, were the result of the Toronto defence not taking out the man in front of Toskala.

The Toronto blueline, supposedly the club's strong suit, certainly was exposed in Game 2 of the regular season. Newcomers Jonas Frogren and Luke Schenn looked slow and lost at times and had trouble keeping up with Montreal's speed. But they certainly weren't the only ones. In fact, Wilson insisted that Schenn was the best Toronto defenceman on the ice.

"It wasn't our young players tonight who laid an egg, it was some of the veteran guys who will probably want to say that it was the young guys who didn't get the job done," Wilson said. "But some people have to step up in a situation like that and lead. You just can't go off on your own plan when you get behind in a game, and that's exactly what we did.""