The Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League (SJHL) playoffs have arrived.
A regular season that spans 58 games and nearly six months has come to an end. All of the time spent on the bus, criss-crossing the province, playing in a variety of rinks, has culminated in this.
You play that 58-game regular season for the right to play in the postseason. If you’re the Weyburn Red Wings, Melville Millionaires, Notre Dame Hounds or the Kindersley Klippers, you have the frustration of tracking the postseason from the sidelines.
(Thankfully, the SJHL reduced the number of playoff teams from 10 to eight this season. There was just something wrong about 10 of 12 teams making the playoffs).
For much of the season, it was touch and go whether the Estevan Bruins would qualify. They were near the bottom of the league standings, points-wise, at Christmas, although they had also played the fewest games in the league. They couldn’t win three straight games. They couldn’t score.
But they’ve had the best record in the league since the Christmas break at 18-6-1, and the team that couldn’t piece together a winning streak in the first three months of the season has won five straight on three separate occasions.
They’ve defeated every team in the league since Christmas, other than the Battlefords North Stars and Kindersley, but those are teams the Bruins haven’t played since early December.
So you can understand why Bruins fans should be optimistic entering the quarter-final series against the Melfort Mustangs. This is not the Bruins team that we saw at the start of the season, the team that struggled to score, the team that didn’t generate a lot of excitement, and the team that just couldn’t get any momentum.
The post-Christmas Bruins have been exciting and dynamic. They’ve averaged more than 4 1/2 goals per game. And they’ve had a few fights and dust-ups, too, a turnaround for a team that didn’t have a fight until its 17th game of the season.
This is the team that fans can look forward to watching at Affinity Place. They’re relentless and they’re entertaining. Fans feel like they get their money’s worth when they watch the Bruins play.
It should also make for an interesting contrast against a Melfort team that allowed the second-fewest goals in the league, and whose goalie, Shawn Parkinson, posted shutouts in four of his final five starts.
The hockey will be fast, intense and very entertaining.
And it’s like that for every level of hockey in the area, whether it’s novice, senior or recreation, and anything in between. There’s that ramped-up intensity at this time of year.
Regardless of whether you’re eight or you’re 68, you want to win a championship, you want to celebrate with your teammates and you don’t want the sting of knowing you lost that last meaningful game of the season.
(The NHL, of course, is a completely different animal. There’s nothing more intense in sports than the Stanley Cup playoffs).
In the end, there’s usually only going to be one team at each level that wins that final meaningful game. In junior A, it’s more pronounced than most leagues; the team that wins the SJHL title still has to play an opponent from Manitoba to determine which team advances to the national tournament. And once they get to nationals, they have to play six games in a little more than a week to capture that national championship.
And if they don’t win nationals, they have the sting of knowing that they played as long and as hard as the team that won the championship, but didn’t win the biggest prize possible. Yes there’s the thrill of victory, knowing that you won the league title and you beat another league champion to get to nationals, but the pain of losing remains.
(Yes, this is a bit of a preview of what we’ll get in Estevan when we host the 2022 Centennial Cup).
For the members of the Estevan Bruins and other junior hockey teams, there’s also that knowledge that your time spent in junior hockey is finite, anywhere from one to four seasons. Very few players get a chance to play at nationals. The odds of getting a second chance are very remote.
It’s not professional to say this, but naturally I want to see the Bruins win, just like I want to see any Estevan team win, in any sport.
I want to see huge crowds at Affinity Place for the Bruins playoff run, regardless of whether they get a couple of home games, or seven home games, which they’ve had the past couple seasons.
When Affinity Place has been packed the past two seasons, with 2,662 fans to watch the Bruins beat the Nipawin Hawks and the Humboldt Broncos, it has been a fun place to be. Even when there have been 2,000 fans present, the atmosphere has been terrific.
We’ve been lucky to see longer playoff runs the past three seasons; hopefully the Bruins can do it once again.
After all, it’s the best hockey we’ll see all year.
