And Just Like That, It's Over

From September 26, 2019, Stars pre-season game vs Minnesota Wild

I always have a lot to say after a team I follow postseason run has ended. Sadly, it’s always been after a loss to end the season. I was really hoping this would be different, alas, here we are.

I will say this is much different than the last time I wrote something like this, after the Texas Rangers’ very short lived postseason run in 2016. I said this on the podcast but the 2019-2020 Dallas Stars making it to the Stanley Cup Finals felt a lot like the 2010 Texas Rangers making it to the World Series.

It wasn’t necessarily expected, and therefore I didn’t have any expectations of them winning, so I’m gonna try to enjoy the ride. Which I may have failed at during certain moments of the series, but overall ended yesterday, feeling proud of how far this team came.

A 1-7-1 start, a head coach leaving less than two months into the season, a crappy March, a long Covid suspension, and then looking awful in the round robin. I had no reason to believe the Stars would get past Calgary, and then Colorado, and then Vegas. And somehow they managed to do so. All while Ben Bishop, their 1A goalie, made just one, albeit unnecessary, start in the entire postseason. Essentially having an entire starting line “unfit to play,” the FCC line essentially a curse to any forward who dare move on to it. An interim head coach who refused to give proper ice time to the leading goal scorer on the team, who also scored four goals in a game and followed that by getting an assist streak going. Tyler Seguin played through a hip, knee, and groin injury. I’m sure a number of other injuries by a number of other players as well.

You gotta be proud of this team.

And damn proud of Anton Khudobin who did everything he could to keep this team in a position to win and at times stole the win for them.

I think it would be too easy and completely unfair to say the Stars gave up in game six, or just didn’t care. It’s hard to imagine that we as fans could possibly care more about winning that came than anyone on the ice in green jerseys on Monday. Absolutely it sucked to watch and that is not how we wanted to watch their season end. But I think it’s fair to say that fatigue caught up to them (and I’ll be honest, I blame a lot of that loss on coaching.)

I realize this post is all over the place, very much like my brain is right now, this is all for cathartic processing of how the season has come to an end so I really had no idea where to start and where this was going to go. But yes this sucks, obviously every fan wants to see their team end the season on a win, we’re all sports mourning right now. I would say Tampa had been the favorite to win it all throughout the entirety of the postseason, the fact that the Stars took them to six games, it wasn’t always pretty but the Stars fought for where they ended up.

Two months ago, did any of us think the Dallas Stars would be the Western Conference Champions? Be honest! I sure didn’t. So I’m gonna hang my hat on that and I hope the players can too. Obviously we all wanted more, but now they know what they’re capable of coming into next season. Next season is where the expectations come into play.

But overall, I truly appreciate them being a distraction the last two/three months from everything going on in the world. Those couple of hours every other day were a true escape and something I’m grateful for.