ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½

He had set up Connor McDavid’s overtime gold-medal goal over the U.S. at the 4 Nations Face-Off, corralling a puck that had been rimmed around the boards, deflecting it from his skate to his stick, then passing out from the corner to McDavid, who wristed a shot over Connor Hellebuyck.

Canada coach Jon Cooper, alert to Marner’s defensively vigilant play, had earlier flipped him from a scoring line to a checking line. But Cooper reunited Marner with McDavid, stirred them together anew for the elixir that produced that championship-clinching moment.

Marner had plenty of iconic moments in the memorable tournament: He set up Sam Bennett’s game-tying goal in the second period of that tense deciding game, he was formidable on the penalty kill throughout, he slipped seamlessly into whatever role Cooper assigned him, and he scored the overtime winner in a round-robin game against Sweden.

It was the best of Marner, teased out by a perceptive coach who recognized the player’s keen ice vision and offensive creativity.

Yeah, we’ll always have that Marner-the-hero, even if he wasn’t wearing a Leafs jersey at the time. For a while there, even the haters dialed down their venom.

But there weren’t enough such iconic flashes in Marner’s nine-year career with the Leafs, He never stepped foot on a Stanley Cup final stage, didn’t get anywhere near close enough. He became the scapegoat in ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½â€™s colossal playoff busts, as happens when a 100-points-a season superstar racks up a mere 13 goals in 70 playoff games. In the nine games that ended Leafs seasons, Marner had zero goals.

Frankly, the invective hurled at Marner, mostly by hysterical bloggers and the social media commentariat, was way over the top. And it ate at him.

“I gave everything I had, but in the end it wasn’t enough,’’ Marner said in his Instagram farewell to ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½. “That’s hard to admit, because I wanted it so badly, for all of us.’’

That was sincere.

Everybody, it seemed, had a mental handle on Marner, parsing his post-game scrums, reading his body language, playing armchair shrink. He was variously good-riddance dismissed as a diva, a thin-skinned crybaby, a malcontent, a candy-ass — none of which carries much truth, actually. He was simply not as regular-season advertised and, through nine years, the Leafs couldn’t win with him.

Yet how has the Leafs’ marrow really altered when Treliving has re-upped John Tavares and the rest of the roster remains largely intact, personified primarily by Auston Matthews, Morgan Rielly and William Nylander?

Why wouldn’t Marner hop on the first stagecoach out of here after cleaving these past two years to his no-trade codicil, and finally running into the warm embrace of the Vegas Golden Knights, leaving behind a bottom-six scrap for the Leafs, the only asset GM Brad Treliving could secure in a last minute sign-and-trade deal? Which may have been in the gleaming — a mutual coveting between Marner and Vegas — over the last year, verging on tacit tampering by the Golden Knights, at least in the pointy heads of suspicious tinfoil hatters.

Marner has been lambasted for blocking a trade to Carolina at the February deadline that would have brought Mikko Rantanen to ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½. It was his prerogative. The boilerplate lesson absorbed again when Mats Sundin refused to budge in 2008 is that no Leafs player owes the team anything because accommodation is rarely a two-way street, combustible trades have been wildly retributive in the ugly past, and sentiment is a nonfactor. Regardless of the lustre, everyone is dispensable.

“My wife was seven or eight months pregnant at the time,’’ Marner told reporters in Vegas on Tuesday. “We weren’t going to go somewhere that maybe was going to be a short stint.’’

The Leafs are a significantly denuded outfit in the wake of Marner’s departure, with slim pickings on the free-agent shelf, a scarcity of trade bait apart from the untouchables, and no major acquisition to fill the hole of ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½â€™s points leader this season and gaudy assists savant. If ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½â€™s DNA has changed — Treliving had said it needed changing — it’s been by wholesale and injurious subtraction, leaving the team substantially more offensively anemic. Giddy visions of Brad Marchand coming here, Sam Bennett coming here, amounted to sweet flip-off all.

If Marner absolutely had to go — the consensus view — because he was not built for the hard-banging, close-quarters post-season wars, the Leafs are far less inured against the in-season labours in a conference where the recent have-nots have enhanced themselves and now pose a serious threat.

The pitchfork mob has had its way, the erasure of Marner no more rational than the sacking of Brendan Shanahan, the other finger-pointed fall-guy in the Maple Leaf cosmos.

You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.