My Favorite Time of the Year

Is this the best time of the year?

Did you wonder what to do in the two-day void between the final games of the NHL's regular season and the opening round of the 2011 Stanley Cup playoffs? Did you watch NHL On The Fly on a continuous loop during those 48 hours?

Let me guess: You asked yourself the same thing I asked myself in that time - is it Wednesday yet? 

The time is almost here. 

The beauty of playoff hockey is this - we're predicting, prognosticating and even praying that maybe "this is the year" for your team. Or for my team. Or our team.

And there are storylines galore. 

If you've got any interest in the Tim Thomas Foundation and in the Tim Thomas Hockey Camps, it's easy to guess where your rooting interest rests - the Boston-Montreal series. It's one of the most storied NHL rivalries, and also one of its most dramatic, especially given the theatrics of this season - the melee during the Bruins' 8-6 win in February at TD Garden, or Zdeno Chara's hit on Max Pacioretty - and the NHL's response -  that ignited a firestorm of discussion, criticism, analysis and even a potential business boycott of the NHL. 

(Is this the NHL playoffs, or is this a soap opera? That's why we keep watching.) 

But the fact of the matter is that in at least four games and in at most seven, someone's going home. Someone moves on and someone else's hopes are dashed. 

Is there an intriguing matchup? 

Here are three:

In the West, Chicago vs. Vancouver in a 1-8 matchup. We'll see a completely revamped Blackhawks lineup against Vancouver, the heavy favorite to win the Stanley Cup ... though Vancouver is annually plagued by postseason inconsistency. (Performance anxiety?)

In the East, Pittsburgh vs. Tampa Bay in a 4-5 matchup. You wonder how even these matchups traditionally are, and the absence of Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin has brought out a different identity in the Penguins. They'll face an upstart Tampa Bay team led by Martin St. Louis and Steve Stamkos, one of the NHL's best snipers, though this will be a big matchup of goaltenders in Tampa Bay's Dwayne Roloson and and Pittsburgh's Marc-Andre Fleury. 

In the East, Buffalo vs. Philadelphia in a 3-6 matchup. Like Vancouver, Philadelphia is another heavy favorite to win the Stanley Cup but slowly crumbled at the end of the regular season. Buffalo, meanwhile, rode a late surge to earn a playoff berth. 

The best part about the playoffs, obviously, is the Stanley Cup Finals, and you know you've done something right if you're still playing hockey at that point in June, so don't feel badly for anyone else polishing their golf clubs and booking their trips to Cabo San Lucas.

There are no more shootouts. Fourteen teams are already gone. Sometime in June, you'll look at the scoreboard and see only two teams left (trust me, it's a good place for those two teams to be). In the end, it's about balance. One team will walk away with their place in history. The other will be the answer to one of many trivia questions. 

But isn't that what makes this the best time of the year? 

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Rachel Lenzi covers hockey for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram