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The boys can't lose. All the evidence says so.
Who stacked up a club-record 56 “W's”?
Your Fort Wayne Komets.
Who gorged on a record 120 points?
Komets again.
Who peeled off a record 25 straight home wins … and went 10-3-1-1 against Muskegon, their first-round playoff opponent … and so utterly failed to coast that they closed out the regular season by losing just one game from St. Paddy's Day on?
Komets, Komets, Komets.
Hand 'em the Turner Cup right now. It's springtime, the sun is shining, we should all be outside anyway.
Of course, if we do go outside, we'll miss one thing that could derail all this presumption.
We'll miss playoff hockey.
It's different. It's tougher and more physical and subject to whims only the hockey gods understand. Which is why it's the best form of the genre in any sport, anywhere.
“Almost every shift is magnified,” says Komets captain Guy Dupuis, who can't explain it any better than anyone else. “You'll see more hits, more intensity …”
“Everything, if everybody gets into it, gets bumped up a speed,” P.C. Drouin adds.
And, yes, everything does get magnified. The puck suddenly turns into a beach ball for the goalie in the other net, and those 56 wins vanish with four, five, a dozen olés of his glove. You make a mistake in your own end that means nothing in the regular season, and those 120 points become just points of irony on your way to the early hook.
The good news is, this team seems to get that.
It had only history to play for the last couple of months of the season and still it was the hottest team in the league down the stretch, just as it was in most periods preceding the stretch. It was a remarkable display of focus, or perhaps not so remarkable.
“I think it stemmed directly from (coach Al Sims),” Dupuis says. “He had high standards for us, set the bar high, and after that the trickle-down effect was there.”
Drouin agrees.
“Al kept on top of us,” he says. “We were going pretty good, but he never let us get too far ahead of ourselves. When we were making mistakes we were hearing about it; he didn't let us get away with anything.”
And maybe that's because Sims has been around the block a few times, and he has a long memory. He remembers, no doubt, 1991-92, when the Komets won the IHL East with a then club-record 112 points. In the first round of the playoffs they met Kalamazoo, which finished the regular season 28 points behind them.
Kalamazoo won in seven, rallying from a 3-2 deficit and winning Game 7 in Fort Wayne.
So, yeah, it can happen. But understanding that is half the battle - and the rest is having a team that seems suitably built for the playoffs, mentally as well as physically.
A team that has not just one hot goalie but two, Kevin Reiter and Nick Boucher. A team on which no fewer than seven players are having career seasons, a key ingredient in more than one championship run over the years. A team that has been beating opponents who've been in playoff mode for weeks - and which, scarily, isn't yet satisfied.
“Yeah, we've played with a lot of focus,” Drouin says. “But there's room for improvement, I think.”
I don't see how that's possible, frankly. But if it is, this is what it will look like:
Komets over Muskegon in four.
Komets over Flint in six.
