Blackhawks' outlook couldn't look much better. So why am I so nervous?

The Blackhawks beat the San Jose Sharks again last night, 4-2, and now lead the series two games to none. They have yet to play their first game of the series at home. And since they set a record last night for the most consecutive playoff victories on the road, maybe coming home to the UC isn't an unmixed blessing.

If the Hawks win the series with the Sharks, they will play either Montreal or Philadelphia for the Stanley Cup. By rights, they shouldn't have much trouble with either one. But I grew up fearing the Canadiens and their tradition, and (as I've noted before) the last time the Hawks went into the Stanley Cup Finals as favorites (in 1971), they lost to a Montreal team with a hot rookie goalie named Ken Dryden. This year's Montreal team has a hot rookie goalie named Jaraslav Halek.

But no matter. The Flyers, too, have a two-games-to-none lead in their series, and they're objectively a better team than the Habs. It looks at this juncture very much like the Hawks will be playing in the Finals, and against a team they certainly ought to be able to beat with little trouble.

So why am I so nervous? Ok, it has been 49 years since that memorable night in Detroit when the Hawks won their last Cup. And I am a Chicago sports fan- and a Cub fan to boot- who is used to teams who, on paper, should have no trouble winning championships breaking my heart.

But the closer we get to the Finals, the more it looks like this will be the year the Hawks will hoist the Cup. Thing is, though, that the Sharks- even if the Hawks have beaten them five of the six times the two teams have met this year- are a very, very good hockey team. In fact, they had a better record than the Hawks did this year (though only by one point).

There is another scenario alongside the one in which the Hawks and the Flyers continue to dominate their respective series, and Chicago beats Philadelphia in the Finals. In this one, the Hawks discover their inner Cubitude, and find a way somehow to blow their two-zip lead and somehow lose this series to the Sharks. And then there's the possibility that the Flyers might do to the Hawks what the 1969 Mets and the 1984 Padres and the 2006 Marlins and the 2008 Dodgers did to the Cubs, and against all odds and reason somehow upset a far superior Chicago team.

To grow up a sports fan in Chicago- and specifically both a Blackhawks fan and, in particular, a Cubs fan- is to grow up paranoid. I remember a cartoon in one of the local papers back in 1984 in which a fan sat chewing his fingernails in the bleachers of a moonlit Wrigley Field beneath a scoreboard proclaiming a Cubs victory in the seventh game of the World Series several hours before. The caption: "They're gonna blow it. I don't know how, but somehow they're gonna blow it."

And sonuvagun if they didn't find a way to do precisely that.

I'll believe this when I see Captain Serious and his merry men skating around the boards with Lord Stanley's Mug. And maybe not even then.