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Posted on Tue, May. 06, 2008

Jennifer Floyd Engel: Stars' past can't really predict their future

By JENNIFER FLOYD ENGEL

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

"Until they prove otherwise, this is the Stars.

They are the team who too often folds their tent first when the game gets hard.

This is who they are. This is what they do."

-- Yours truly, March 14, 2008, following the Stars' 5-3 loss to the Red Wings.

You will not find any waffling this morning, not by me, not in this space. After watching them, as Emmitt Smith might say, "get debacled" in Detroit on that random Thursday back in March, I had this Stars team pegged for another quick and dirty playoff run.

Brutal does not do justice to how pathetically compliant they were in Joe Louis. And so it is fitting, in a playoff march that has been all about slaying monkeys for this Stars team, what awaits now is the biggest.

Returning to Detroit.

Where ugly typically happens to them.

And where maybe, just possibly, from that embarrassing mess, this Stars team finally started to become a group capable of an extended Stanley Cup playoff stay. Maybe, they had to slop through a month of ugly to finally develop that resiliency they lacked.

Because what they have become is a team that no longer folds when games get hard.

That is no longer who the Stars are. They have proven otherwise.

They did so by beating the defending champion Ducks in convincing fashion, by finishing off San Jose and mostly by how they gutted through a marathon Game 6 on Sunday.

Four overtimes is a lot of hockey, two complete games plus part of another and what was Lombardi's line about fatigue making cowards of us all?

There were plenty of chances for this Stars team to go down easy, after a random penalty on defenseman Nicklas Grossman, when Sharks captain Patrick Marleau had Game 7 on his stick, when so many point-blank chances went unanswered.

But this team does not have a lot of give up in them, even when faced with seemingly impossible tasks.

"Nobody gave us a chance against Anaheim. Nobody gave us a chance against San Jose," an emotional Stars coach Dave Tippett said afterward, after a power-play goal by his captain Brenden Morrow at 9:03 of the fourth overtime catapulted them to a West Finals date.

"But those guys believe in there," he said. "Brenden was saying 'Come on, jump on my back and we're going'. Their will and effort is just phenomenal. I know we talked about the games being so close, can you give us 5-10 percent more? Then I look at Brenden and say 'I'm asking 5-10 more from this guy?'"

He had been going full throttle since this team touched down in Anaheim for Game 1 way back when. He has been scoring and skating and hitting as if on a mission.

He had 19 hits in Game 6. Yes, 1-9 as crazy as that sounds, especially considering included in this total was a check so hard that Milan Michalek had to be escorted off the ice and Morrow himself admitted to seeing stars. He simply refused to let his team lose in that game, really in any game.

And if this sounds like a cliché too often bandied about in sports for very vanilla-like performances, shut up and listen to Stars defenseman Stephane Robidas explain the Morrow trickle-down effect.

"We do not have any quit in us," he said, "because he does not have any quit in him."

They used to have quit in them, a lot of it.

There are a couple of Avs players from a couple of years ago watching this team and wondering "Who is this team? And what did they do with the Stars we handled in five games." They will never say so but there are a probably a couple of Red Wings players wondering where the Stars from six weeks ago have gone.

They would love to play that team again. This one, not so much.

Revisionist history types will say "Oh, it was never that bad." Or pretend that March or what happened at Joe Louis was not really that ugly.

I was there. It was.

And to pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to how hard Morrow and his teammates and Tip had to dig in to get them to this point, four victories away from playing for Lord Stanley's Cup.

"Thinking about what our team has been through, right back from the start of the year to March, everybody hated us, now we're down to four teams," Tip said. "Players have been through a lot. To see them as resilient as they are, they really believed. That's what it's all about."

No, you will not find any waffling this morning, not from me. I repeat: That Stars team from March would not stand a chance in this series against Detroit. It would be too hard. They would not have had the stomach for the fight required to beat the Red Wings.

This team, though, strengthened by adversity has a puncher's chance.

They do not know how to do anything but fight, emboldened by a captain who leads the way every single game.

This is the Stars now. This is what they have become.