Bernstein: 'Hawks Must Beat Vancouver To Validate Season
By Dan Bernstein--
Like a patient back from the brink, the Blackhawks have a new appreciation of life.
Last rites were administered after the Sunday loss to Detroit, with some players beginning offseason planning, many not even giving a second though to watching the Stars polish off the lowly Wild later on. Fans filled afternoon airwaves and message-boards with wails and accusations.
When the improbable happened, the drear was replaced quickly by the bloom of a manic, overreactive optimism, fueled largely by the opening matchup that begins tonight in Vancouver.
"Not only are we alive, but, by god – we're playing the Canucks!! We ALWAYS beat the Canucks!! Eight seeds win all the time!! Playoff beards! Luongo sucks! KAAAANERRR!"
Throughout the entire regular season, there was a tenuous undercurrent of hopeful expectation – with every next game, a feeling that last year's inspired team lay dormant inside this one, just waiting to emerge.
Early struggles were attributed to "hangover," the idea being that a Stanley Cup winner rides the parade all the way through a short, boozy summer, and plays without the same mettle when fat and happy. The salary-cap purges made the commemorative team posters seem instantly odd, with the number of new parts allowed some time to mesh with the material veterans.
As the year wore on, though, the sense of "Any time, now, guys…" built as the games were checked off the schedule. The playoffs began weeks ago, really, with too many must-wins in March. Captain Jonathan Toews has delivered countless fiery pep-talks as inexplicable stretches of dull, absentminded hockey continued all the way to the end.
This is the latest, best-defined marking point for the belief that these Hawks are actually something more than what they have been.
And it's true that strange things happen in a sport with the greater randomness that comes with low scoring, funny bounces and shifting lines. Eight-seeds win an astonishing 28 percent of the time.
Also true is that Chicago beats Vancouver, and goalie Roberto Luongo is emotionally fragile and prone to lapses. Talented as he is, he can lose it – he has, at times, resembled a house-cat batting playfully at a ball of yarn.
The Canucks are better at hockey than the Blackhawks. They score more goals, prevent more goals, convert more power plays and kill more penalties.
But this is as much a chance for the Blackhawks to prove they are better at hockey than the Blackhawks.
Face it: this has been an unsatisfying year, as the incomparable joy of a championship has dissipated over the ensuing months of fits and starts, with all the new players and all the untimely injuries. The NHL playoffs afford a chance to wash some of that away, but that won't happen if the result is just a few more games of the same tacked on at the end.
This year's team may not be a champion, but it at least can show that its prized, expensive core is intact, functioning, and fully worthy of being the structure for building a yearly title contender.
For this second chance to really matter – for this frustrating season to feel like it has meaning -- the Hawks have to win this series.
Dan Bernstein has been the co-host of "Boers and Bernstein" since 1999. He joined the station as a reporter/anchor in 1995. The Boers and Bernstein Show airs every weekday from 1PM to 6PM on The Score, 670AM. Read more of Bernstein's blogs here. Follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein.
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