Les Canadiens sont la!

Unbelievable.

After ousting the President's Trophy-winning Washington Capitals in the first round, the playoff team with the worst record- the Montreal Canadiens- knocked the defending Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins out of the playoffs last night. Les bleu-blanc-rouge will play either the staggering Boston Bruins or the resurgent Philadelphia Flyers in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Now, I mean no disrespect to any of those teams. But with the demise of the Pens, the only team left in the playoffs that the rational side of me is really afraid of is the San Jose Sharks, who are playing my Blackhawks in the Western Conference Finals. The winner of that series should win the Stanley Cup- which statement might well prove to be the hockey equivalent of Frank Chance's now-ironic 1908 question, "Who ever heard of the Cubs losing a game they had to have?" It isn't necessarily the best team that wins the Stanley Cup. It's the hottest team- and in particular, the team with the hottest goalie. And they don't come much hotter than Montreal's Jaroslav Halak.

Just a couple of months or so there were rumors that the Hawks might trade perhaps Patrick Sharp and maybe another young star along with Cristobel Huet to Montreal in order to be able to go into the playoffs with a tandem of Halak and Antti Niemi in goal. Probably the fact that both Halek and Niemi are rookies (logically, the Hawks would have been looking for a veteran to pair with Niemi) torpedoed any chance that the offer would ever be made. The Hawks chose, in any case, to stand pat. But somewhere in my gut there is a queasy feeling, a disturbing memory of the last time the Hawks were in this position.

It was 1971, the year the Habs knocked the best team in hockey, the Bruins, out of the playoffs. The Hawks- on paper probably the next best team- were favored to beat Montreal in the Finals. The series went the full seven games, culminating in a 3-2 Canadiens victory in what has been called the greatest hockey game ever played.

There is no doubt in my mind that the Hawks had the better team. But the Habs had wa hot young goalie who was built like a giraffe and named Ken Dryden. I imagine there are ex-Blackhawks who still have nightmares about Dryden making impossible save after impossible save as the good guys crashed the net over and over again, dominating the last half of the third period, but somehow never able to get the tying goal past him.

And then, there's the myth. While they haven't been anything like their old, dominating selves in recent years- like the New York Yankees of a few years ago, they had a long dry spell- les Habs are historically, when all is said and done, the Yankees of hockey. They've won more Cups than anyone else, and just the tradition those colors represent is itself something to fear. The first several years I was a hockey fan, Jacques Plante and the Canadiens broke my heart over and over again in the post season, and I'm still feeling the effects of the trauma.

I don't necessarily fear the Habs as such. But I fear Halak, and- rationality aside- I fear the sweater he wears. Whether Boston or Philadelphia ends up winning Game Seven in their series, I'll be rooting for them to take out Montreal.

But first things first. First, we have to dispose of the one team in the Western Conference that had a better record than the Blackhawks- though only by one point: the San Jose Sharks.

Oh, and by the way: the Blackhawks and the Sharks played four times during the regular season. For what it's worth, the Hawks won three of those games.