The Dallas Stars have put themselves in a perfect spot
Now, they must continue to check off boxes and get ready for a shot at immortality.
Anytime you start a season with what you believe is a chance to win a championship, there are plenty of things to worry about.
Your mind can start racing and you know that this area of your team has not been fortified. That this side over here might be too young or too old or too fragile.
The Dallas Stars were surely no different. They have every intention of attempting to run up that hill again, but as sports works, you must go all the way back to training camp to get another shot at the crown. That journey is long, difficult, and filled with potential dangers of attrition or crisis. It weighs on the minds of those who coordinate the campaign.
Just last spring, they had a real chance at winning it all. In fact, for a while there, it appeared that they were the Dallas team that was going to bring home the first Post-Dirk parade. It didn’t happen, but 10 playoff wins in a single spring is a very rare feat for any NHL franchise and put the city on notice that they were getting closer and closer.
You need 16 postseason wins.
The 16 playoff wins equals one Stanley Cup and parade. Those are the rules and have been so for a very long time in this sport and the question was how you could take out two more opponents than you did.
To be fair, eight playoff wins gets you a trip to the Final Four and that is when your heart starts to believe that anything is truly possible.
The trouble with that, of course, is that eight means you are only half-way there. Everything was possible. But too many of the youngsters went missing as we went deep into May and as valiantly as everyone fought, the inability of winning one of those first two overtime games in Vegas and Jamie Benn’s momentary lapse of reason in Game 3 will be long be remembered as what killed the dream.
So, back to the bottom of the hill to restart the climb again.
That is what makes the dream so fetching. You want to see Joe Pavelski and Benn holding the cup because you know they don’t have much time left in their decorated careers. They both can still play very well, but you also know that it would not shock the sports world if either had a goodbye-to-the-NHL press conference this summer.
It happens fast. Urgency is high to get there and quickly.
And if you add up the five years that have led us to this point, you see that the 2020 playoffs – one in which Dallas had 14 of the 16 wins secured before they were beaten by a better opponent in Tampa Bay – and the 2023 playoffs could definitely be considered a prelude to the top of the mountain being scaled in 2024.
Could.
In other words, the Cup dream wouldn’t be “out of nowhere” for the Dallas Stars.
They have won six different playoff series between 2019 and now and while that may not sound very impressive to a cynic, I would suggest that there are few teams that can say they have won more during that time. And given the decade from the 2009 season until 2019 had just one happy handshake, we should realize we are living in a glorious era of Stars hockey.