Dallas Stars at their best if everyone's a star

The Dallas Stars are a lot like Stephane Robidas' scarred and battered face, which made it particularly fitting Thursday when his mug was featured on the front of this section, along with a road map detailing each of his wounds, old and new.

Like Robidas, the whole team should come with one of those yellow highway warning signs: "Dip Ahead."

Or maybe, "Slow Down for S-Curve."

These Stars are old and young, wise and foolish, eager and cautious, all at the same time.

On any given night, not even coach Dave Tippett is absolutely sure what he might see on the ice.

Except for this: He knows now that he will get everything his players have.

Everything.

"That's all you can ask, really," Tippett said Thursday before the Stars boarded their plane for San Jose, Calif., where their second-round, best-of-seven series begins tonight with the Sharks. "They're doing that part and that's all you can ask for.

"If everybody does their part to the max, we give ourselves a chance."

There is something about this team, something that came rising to the surface in the Stars' vanquishing of the defending Stanley Cup champs, the Anaheim Ducks, in the first round. I would like to step out and say it's that indefinable something that every champion must possess, but it might be a tad too soon to crawl completely out on that limb.

Let's just say, for the moment, that it's an easy team to like right now.

Maybe that's why Tippett's voice was almost shaking in the postgame media session after the Stars' Game 6 triumph that eliminated the Ducks at the AAC.

Tippett doesn't back away from that emotion.

"There are young guys getting an unbelievable experience, and some veteran guys, you never know when it's going to be their last roundup," Tippett said at the StarCenter before the Stars boarded their flight. "There's all those things, and, when you see how hard they work and how hard they try, how much they want to get this accomplished, when they get over a step, it's good to see."

This is a Stars team that has genuinely bonded by surviving the flames of adversity. They all but collapsed in March, when a huge deadline trade for center Brad Richards seemed to be backfiring. But they came out on the other side stronger, more resilient, even more determined.

"The adversity we went through in March to try to bring the group together really helped us," Tippett said. "The last few games of the season really helped us."

These aren't your daddy's Stars any more. Or mine, for that matter. They are younger, more eager, hungrier. And that's a good thing.

"We have a very good mix," Tippett said. "It's too easy to say, 'Ah, you've got young guys, you're young, whatever.' Those young guys really bring an energy to our team, really bring a determination, and I think that helps some of the veteran guys.

"We've also gone through a kind of changing of the guard in the leadership. [Mike] Modano, [Jere] Lehtinen and [Sergei] Zubov are still a big part of the leadership, but when you look at [Brenden] Morrow, [Marty] Turco, guys like [Steve] Ott, Richards coming in, Robidas. I look at it as a very good mix right now."

The most important thing is that they've grasped the team concept. Everyone seems to be pulling on the same rope, something that seemed to be lacking in Stars teams over the last few years.

"You see the way we played and the way the young guys jumped in, and even the older guys, the guys who hadn't won it before, they're hungry," Robidas pointed out. "They're willing to compete, and everybody's sticking up for each other every time there's a scrum.

"There's a fine line between winning and losing, and it's winning those battles one-on-one. The more you win those battles, the better chance you have."

It's one thing to talk about believing in each other, but the Stars have stepped out to prove that they're not all talk. The six-game series victory over Anaheim changed the way the Stars look at themselves.

"We talked about that belief system, believing you can win, but going into Anaheim, [winning] those first two games in there were a real shot in the arm for us," Tippett said. "Now what you see is that spark, or that energy, and it's very positive.

"It is unpredictable a little bit because half our team hasn't been in this situation before. You can look at a glass half full or a glass half empty; we're looking at it half full."

This is not a team waiting on Modano, or Zubov, or whoever to lead it to the promised land. That's not going to happen. It's going to take each of them doing his own job to get it done.

"It's all about team," Tippett said. "That's the way it's going to get done. We don't have a Mario Lemieux; we don't have that one guy who's going to dictate the outcome.

"If we're going to be successful, it has to be as a team. That's veteran guys, young guys, Turco, all of them. It's as a group."

That, after all, is now Stars hockey.

The face of the Stars once belonged to the girl magnet, the devilish and devil-may-care Modano, and there was nothing wrong with that. But that was then and this is now.

The face of the Stars now is of an everyman named Robidas, who faces hours of plastic surgery once he decides to hang up his skates.

In everything he does and is, he represents team.

It's an amazing concept that the Stars have embraced. Now we find out just how far it can take them.