YOU DON'T SCORE, UNTIL YOU SCORE

The Blue Jays are livin' la vida long ball; and the Stanley Cup playoffs are here, but is the goal-scoring going to stay? Does that necessarily matter?

THE TORONTO BLUE JAYS recorded one of those wins which dumb people who want to seem smart always describe as a Pyrrhic victory. A.J. Burnett's elbow flared up and he lasted only four innings before coming out of the game; but the Jays erased a four-run Red Sox lead in the eighth, and went on to win, 7-6 in 12 innings.

Burnett's health is overriding concern for all those people who fret over how J.P. Ricciardi spends Ted Rogers' money.

But speaking as a neurotic Jays fan, you can count on me to have a few more:

1) Can this team win a game without hitting home runs? The eighth-inning comeback included homers by Russ Adams, Vernon Wells (who'd hit one earlier) and Troy Glaus. Not only can the Jays not count on having that happen too often, but they might have pushed the winning run across had someone been able to deliver a simple two-out single.

A good measuring stick for a ballclub is whether or not it can win games without home runs. Of course, the jury's still out on that one.

2) Attendance: only 28,233 with the Red Sox in town and no competing distractions? Considering how many Red Sox diehards go to Toronto for the cheaper, more easily acquired tickets, that's troubling. The Canadian Press story said fans were split evenly between the home team and visitors; you know, just like Scotiabank Place when the Leafs or Habs come to town.

By the way, I'm always suspect of the Boston fans who show up at Rogers Centre to root for the Sox; I'm sure some inherited the tradition from their parents, but others are turncoats who've been diehard, lifelong Red Sox fans since, oh, Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS. End rant.

Now, hopefully Roy Halladay's arm is fine today, or the Jays are SOL.

PLAYOFFS, DAY 1: Memo to a certain newspaper in a city which must not be named: Nice headline, but the Senators have a ways to go before they slay their post-season demons. In Ottawa, they realize that one game is not cause for a parade down Kanata's equivalent of Yonge Street.

One question that's been floating around is how much the "new NHL," so-called, will carry over into the playoffs. The game is much more entertaining than it's been at any point since the late '90s, and it proved hockey doesn't necessarily need a ton of scoring to be interesting: it just needs the appearance of balance between offence and defence.

This year was closer to that ideal than any year in the past 10. One season isn't enough to build a case on whether all the changes -- smaller goalie equipment, legalizing the two-line pass, more power plays -- actually produced the desired result.

But the NHL, in between taking turns patting themselves on the back, might want to consider that for all the changes, the average game (when you factor out shootout winners) this season had 6.05 goals.

That's up from the previous two seasons (5.14 in '03-04 and 5.31 in '02-03), but it's still lower than 10 years ago, 1995-96, when the average game had 6.29 goals.

That season saw a crackdown on obstruction tactics that was abandoned by Christmas, so it's sort of remembered as an anomaly. So I pulled out another season from the mid-'90s at random, 1993-94 -- the first year that the neutral zone trap entered the hockey lexicon -- and found scoring was even higher then: 6.48 goals per game.

And in 1990-91, the last year of the 21-team NHL, scoring was 6.91 goals per game.

Which brings us, belatedly, to one hard reality: more might need to be done to overcome conservative hockey, and coaches who play not to lose.

Witness the Calgary-Anaheim game last night. I'm sure Flames fans and overtime hero Darren McCarty's creditors were thrilled with the outcome, but for anyone without a rooting interest, this was boring with a capital B.It's not so much that it was a 2-1 overtime game, it's just that neither team seemed interested in attacking.

The Detroit-Edmonton game was a 3-2 contest, but it was riveting, because the Red Wings kept up the attack throughout, with Oilers goalie Dwayne Roloson turning them back time and again until one of his own teammates deflected a shot past him for the winning goal in double overtime.

So just to explore this, I'm going to keep tabs on the goal output from this playoff year. Last night's action, when you added in the 32 minutes and 40 seconds of overtime from Calgary and Detroit's wins, had 4.41 goals per game. And remember -- the teams with long-standing reputations for playing really eye-glazing hockey, Dallas and New Jersey, don't start their series until today.

So are we seeing the return of boring, tedious hockey? Too early to tell.

First pitch for the Jays is in 3 minutes. I'm out.