If you've been a Wild fan at any point in the last decade, you know the drill. Show up, get hopes up, get bounced in the opening round. Rinse, repeat, suffer. So when this series tightened up and the closeout game turned into the kind of white-knuckle hockey that makes grown adults consider therapy, the reaction from Stoolies tracked exactly like every Minnesota fan watching at home.
And then Matt Boldy decided he was tired of carrying around a decade of franchise baggage. The series-clincher sends Minnesota out of round one for the first time since 2015, and into a second-round date with the Colorado Avalanche that, on paper, should be appointment television.
The bigger story underneath the celebration is Quinn Hughes. Bill Guerin's trade for him was the kind of swing-for-the-fences move that either defines a GM's tenure or gets him fired, and right now it looks like the former. Hughes has been doing Hughes things — floating around the ice like he's playing a different sport — and Ryan Whitney, who has watched a lot of NHL hockey, is fully on the bandwagon.
Pair Hughes with Brock Faber on the back end and the Wild suddenly have the kind of two-headed defensive monster you actually need to survive a Cup run. That's the bet Guerin made, and that's the reason a Wild–Avs series feels less like a tune-up for Colorado and more like a real fight. The clip-game already had Hughes on a pedestal before the buzzer even sounded.
Round two is going to be a war. Colorado is Colorado — MacKinnon, Makar, the whole skill-and-pace nightmare — but for the first time in a long time, Minnesota walks into a series with the personnel to actually punch back instead of just hanging on. The State of Hockey gets its first second-round series since 2015, and it gets it against the team most people had penciled into the conference final. Buckle up.