SENATORS WIN DO-OR-DIE GAME; SO WHAT'S THE SPIN NOW?

Line for the bandwagon forms to the right, Ottawa.

NHL PLAYOFFS DAY 21

As Harold Ballard once said, "Don't hurt your toes jumping back on the bandwagon."

Perhaps for some, who are probably in a distinct minority, the Ottawa Senators series-extending 2-1 win over the Sabres last night won't be sufficient to renew their faith.

They're probably right to be so cold-blooded and sane about the whole thing. Yes, Buffalo is young and inexperienced, missing a couple key players and might have allowed some doubt to creep in after failing to finish the series tonight.

But honestly, are the Sabres so callow that they could let a three-games-to-none lead slip through their fingers? Buffalo has been an up-and-down team in the regular season, and maybe this is a year where teams get on a roll, and then crash big-time. But . . .

Is Ottawa, a team which has come back to win a playoff series exactly never, capable of pulling of a comeback the likes of which the NHL hasn't seen in more than 30 years?

It would be great to calculate some radical hypothesis forecasting that the Senators will come back. The first three games, two of which were decided in overtime, did flatter Buffalo. Ryan Miller looked bad on Ottawa's winning goal tonight, while Ray Emery has played better since the Game 1 debacle which wasn't entirely his fault.

But still, Ottawa's second period -- outshot 16-3 and able to avoid falling behind largely thanks to Emery -- is enough to suggest that the Senators don't have the goods to pull this off, not with a defence that makes so many mistakes. Which shows I pretty much had Ottawa under my thumb when I said it was more than likely the Senators would make this torture carry into the weekend.

DUCKS 4 AVALANCHE 1 (Anaheim wins series 4-0): Quick test for all you cunning linguists: is Patrice Brisebois French for Aki Berg ... or Wade Belak? "Breeze-by," already the goat on the overtime winner in Game 3 on Tuesday, was directly at fault for all three of Anaheim's goals (not including the empty-netter in the final two minutes). The loss wasn't entirely his, of course -- one guy doesn't make you go 0-for-24 on the power play.

So is Colorado going to melt it down -- starting by allowing future Hall of Famers Rob Blake and Joe Sakic to go elsewhere as free agents -- and start over? Their time at the top has come to an end. That's the party line. But everyone talked about Colorado plunging to the bottom of the standings this season and thanks to some good scouting and player development, they patched together a decent team. That will probably happen next season too, even if Blake and Sakic are gone.

So can Anaheim win the Stanley Cup? Let's not go nuts. Anaheim's run is looking similar to 2003 -- the only time the Senators got past Round 2. Remember that the Senators basically didn't play anyone that season. They drew the Islanders in the first round, then made easy work of the Flyers, who then as now, were a slow-moving, unmotivated bunch.

Anaheim's taken out a Calgary team that apparently forgot it's generally a good idea to have more than one line that can score on a semi-halfway regular basis, then swept Colorado, which battled inconsistency all season and never recovered the form it showed while knocking off Dallas in five games. Now, if the Oilers and Sharks go six or seven games and beat each to a pulp, the winner of that series might have nothing left in the tank for the West final.

As it stands, it's a good idea to get some money down on Anaheim to be in the final while the odds are favourable.

By the way, the last team to sweep the Nordiques/Avalanche in the playoffs was Hartford, THE Whale. That should tell you it was some time ago.

TANGENT ALERT!!

Memo to U.S. writers who make a living covering hockey: would it kill you to learn some basic hockey history?

It's probably a coincidence, but three times tonight while suffering the Interweb, I've caught writers referring to the Eastern or Western Conference when talking about a playoff series from prior to 1993-94.

From 1974 to '93, the NHL was divided into the Campbell and Wales conferences, which worked just fine until Gary Bettman got it into his head that the reason people in Topeka and Peoria weren't watching hockey had to do with the fact that the league's conferences and divisions didn't refer to geography. (If only that was all there was to why most Americans don't watch hockey. It goes way beyond not knowing who Lester Patrick was.)

Never mind that naming a division after someone's who contributed to the sport is a common practice in hockey and the game seems to have survived more or less OK.

Last night, an early AP write-thru of the Colorado-Anaheim game noted the only other times the Avs organization has been swept in the playoffs, one of those instances being the 1982 Eastern Conference final against the Islanders. It was the Wales Conference then. (At this writing, the stories most sites have up now deletes any reference to it.)

Then there's SI.com's Tom Layberger, who committed the gaffe twice in his rundown of the most shocking early exits in playoff history:

• 1989-90 Calgary Flames
  The Flames were No. 1 in the West with 99 points and seeded against the 75-point Kings. Yet Calgary defended its Stanley Cup with a six-game, opening-round defeat that included an embarrassing 12-4 debacle in Game 4.
• 1992-93 Chicago Blackhawks: The window closed after the 106-point top seed in the Western Conference was shut out twice and swept by Curtis Joseph's Blues in the first round.

Maybe Layberger just had the same biorhythms Patrice Brisebois had the past couple nights: No. 9 on the list is Ottawa's craptacular flameout back in 2001 when, "Ed Belfour and the Leafs swept up a storm in the first round."

This will come as a great surprise to Leafs fans, not to mention Curtis Joseph (still in Toronto then) and I suspect, Ed Belfour (still with Dallas at the time.)

And not to pick on one guy too much, but this Layberger gem about the '80-81 Blues (107 points, but went out in the second round) also didn't get past me:

"The Blues tore through an inferior Smythe Division."

Thing is, in '80-81, the 21-team NHL played a balanced schedule, four games against each opponent. The quality of the teams in your division didn't matter because everyone had an equal number of chances to beat the green goo out of the Colorado Rockies or Winnipeg Jets.

Now, this kind of sloppiness isn't just a hockey phenomenon. I've seen way too many references to the Atlanta Braves winning 14 straight NL East titles. Which would be quite a feat, seeing as they were in the NL West until1994. You do the math.

But as a hockey fan, it makes you grind your teeth. You suffer a lot of crap to be a fan of this game. So when reporters who make a living covering the game are so cavalier with their approach to the game's history, it just sucks balls.

OTHER BUSINESS

How about those Blue Jays? Troy Glaus hits two homers and Ted Lilly goes 7 2/3 strong in an 8-3 romp over the A's. Like they said in Wedding Crashers, it's all deadly. Now how about a sweep down in Tampa Bay? Casey Janssen faces Seth McClung -- the best pitcher I know of who shares a surname with a famous Canadian suffragette -- tonight. It's Roy Halladay-Mark Hendrickson on Saturday, followed by Josh Towers-Casey Fossum on Sunday. Yes, it's only May, but the Jays need to sweep someone just to create a buzz. Might as well be the injury-plagued D-Rays.

The Florida Marlins had an announced attendance of 8,717 last night, and that was with Dontrelle Willis pitching against Tim Hudson. Gee, less than nine thousand fans for a home game with your ace pitching: has Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria ever experienced this since he got into baseball? (/sarcasm)

That's all for now. We'll talk agian.