Canucks fans have been waiting a long time for this.
I’m not just talking about the four and a half months that the NHL season was on hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though that was certainly a long time to go without Canucks hockey. Even a normal off-season is punctuated by various hockey ephemera, like the draft, prospect camp, and free agency.
But Canucks fans have been waiting particularly long to get back to the playoffs. While this technically isn’t the playoffs — it notably doesn’t count for trade conditions like the one attached to the first-round pick in the J.T. Miller trade — this play-in qualification round still counts as the postseason.
That’s something Canucks fans haven’t seen since 2015, when they faced the Calgary Flames in the first round in the first year of Jim Benning’s tenure as general manager. The Canucks haven’t made it to the playoffs since — technically, they still haven’t.
It's been even longer since the Canucks won a playoff round. For that, you have to go all the way back to the powerhouse 2011 Canucks, who of course went to the Stanley Cup Final.
In other words, such as those sung by Aaron Lewis, it’s been awhile.
That made it a doubly-painful gut punch when the Canucks played one of their worst games of the year. There was an inescapable “I waited that long for this?” feeling to the game. It was like waiting 16 years for the next Star Wars movie after Return of the Jedi and camping out for tickets to opening night, only to see Jar Jar Binks traipse about the screen, the mystical force reduced to what a scanner says about his power level, and the terrifying villain Darth Vader turned into a catch phrase-spewing ten-year-old.
That wasn’t podracing. And neither was this game, which, like the Phantom Menace on opening night, I watched.
