An all too familiar feeling for Chicago fans

Trib sportswriter Bob Rosenberg has it exactly right: it's not the best team that wins in the playoffs. It's the team that plays best- and right now, it's the Flyers.

The gaffes and the undisciplined play on the part of the Blackhawks are getting embarassing. More to the point, the Hawks are taking a series they had in hand, and by all rights should win, and doing to it pretty much what the Cubs did in 1969, 1984, 2003, 2007, and 2008.

It's hard to avoid the word "choke." And now it's reached the point that in the Trib's poll of its readers as to how the series is going to turn out, a plurality says that it'll be the Flyers in six.

I hope not. Sunday's game, of course, will tell us a great deal. If the Hawks lose again, this time at home, it's over. If they win, there's still a fighting chance.

One thing, however, it certain: if the Blackhawks pull a "Cub" after raising the hopes of Chicago's hockey fans so high, it will be a long, long time before enthusiasm for the Chief's band reaches the heights it has this Spring again. The Hawks won't go back to being the civic joke and afterthought they were when "Dollar Bill" was mismanaging the team, and nearly killing it. They'll continue to sell out night after night.

But the theory has been advanced that hockey fans are sort of like opera fans: that there are really rather few of us, but that we give the impression of being more numerous because of our enthusiasm. The Blackhawks captured the imagination of the entire city this Spring. If they complete the choke, that imagination will prove elusive in the tuture.

And in the meantime, we few, we sappy few, we band of brothers who followed the Hawks both through the dark days of Dollar Bill and through the disappointments of past Stanley Cup Finals lost will spend our summer meditating on the same theme we Cub fans have been left to ponder on those repeated occasions when our hopes have been raised and then dashed at the last, cruelist moment: wouldn't it have been better, finally, not to have had them raised at all?