Can Sharks cheat reaper to become The Revivified Teal?

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The San Jose Sharks are now in the fifth full relocation of their place in the hockey universe, and maybe they’ll find this one most to their liking.

After all, the bar after the first four was set higher than they could handle, and they ended up with a lot of bruised foreheads trying to clear it.

First, they were The Trending Teal, the young team with the galvanizing superstar (Joe Thornton) who could make quick work of the regular season and become the popular pick to win the Stanley Cup, only to fail to teams that were clearly not – Calgary, Edmonton, Detroit.

Then they were The Penultimate Teal, in which they were better than all but one team but dramatically worse than that actual team – Chicago, Vancouver.

Then they were The Placeholding teal, making the playoffs comfortably and then leaving them the same way to teams that were no better on paper but decidedly so on ice – St. Louis, Los Angeles.

Then they were The Choking Teal, in which it took a full season for them to go through an existential crisis caused by puking up a 3-0 first round lead, blaming a jersey letter and then blaming the coach, and watching while yet another team from the same state won the Cup – Los Angeles.

All this assiduous failure has led us to this place and time, where it is now so exhausting just to scorn them that people either don’t even think of them at all, or in one case, from the estimable Allan Muir, make them playoff representatives of Canada in lieu of any actual Canadian team.

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This team is a mass of contradictions – the deeper team that can’t understand geography (worse at home than Edmonton, better on the road than Washington), the team whose best player (Thornton) was a brooding problem last year and part of its beating heart this year (with Joe Pavelski), and whose third best player is a defenseman (Brent Burns) who still may be playing out of position even though he is a candidate as the league’s best defenseman. They are the lively underdog that has chased away more home customers since the 2004 team and repelled more fans on the road than the 2007 one.

They have paid the price for last year’s dysfunction, and may pay for it again this year, but they don’t wear the stains of the 2014 Kings’ series the same way. Then, it defined them, shamed them and nearly destroyed them. Now, it may serve to spark them. It may serve to make them Canada’s team.

They were sixth in the conference on merit, facing at least one (Los Angeles) and possibly both of the two teams that stole California from them, and that by most rational metrics are their superiors. Yet there is something utterly weird about this Sharks team, one that makes them both fascinating and off-putting.

They are deeper than most of their progenitors, but not necessarily deep enough to slash through the Western Conference thicket. Their goaltending is more reliable than it has been in . . . well, maybe ever, but Martin Jones is fifth in minutes but ninth in goals against, 18th in save percentage and not particularly dominant in any area. He does not win games singlehanded the way Jonathan Quick has in the past and Pekka Rinne, Henrik Lundqvist, Ben Bishop can now.

In other words, they could cheat the reaper, at least awhile, or be swiftly reaped. There will be explanations available for either scenario that will not damage them the way 2014 did, because 2014 made them failures. If they cannot beat the Kings, there will be debates about whether the window has actually closed on their extended decade; if they lose to the Ducks, they get some overachievement points. If they get out of California, on the other hand...

Well, let’s put it this way. If they get out of California, they will still not be free of the Golden State Warriors, who own the Bay Area from the Farallones to Reno and Humboldt to Carmel as no team has ever done before. That’s a shadow they cannot escape.

But at least they can escape their own. Maybe they can be The Revivified Teal. Maybe they can be Canada's Team until Canada can provide its own again.

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