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“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Yeah … this is an essay about JRR Tolkien, the hero’s journey and how it applies to flameouts in the NHL Playoffs. Deal with it.

One of the most common elements of any story, from the most banal of children’s literature to the great epics of all time, is the plucky hero confronting the unknown.

If you took the posters from 100 adventure movies and the covers from 100 fantasy novels, more than half of them would feature the protagonist as he gazes with a mixture of fear and purpose into the abyss of whatever awaits.

It’s not always because he wants to, and it’s never without trepidation and anxiety, but the hero unfailingly works up his courage and forges on. The hero is usually given a chance to back out; to leave the task to others, to escape while there’s still time or to just take the blue pill and “you wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe…”

But they don’t, of course. If they do, there’s no story. If they do, the adventure goes on without them, we all read a different book or see a different movie and nobody remembers or cares about the hero who almost rose to the occasion, but couldn’t quite do it.

Which is why nobody will remember, or care, about the San Jose Sharks. Assuming of course that they proceed to lose the first-round series that they currently trail 2-0 to the Anaheim Ducks.

And while Frodo wished that the ring had never come to him, the Sharks actively worked to qualify for the 2009 playoffs.

I haven’t set this entire post up to make fun of the Sharks (that one is reserved for when they do finally lose) but to try and explain the kind of mentality that produces success in the playoffs, and to try and figure out what’s keeping the Sharks (and what kept all those great — in the regular season anyway — Ottawa Senators teams) from ultimate glory.

There are a few things to consider, and they all deal, as Bilbo so aptly described, with the dangerous business of going out your door.

First, it’s just not that hard to play hockey in the regular season. The schedule is set several months in advance. You can plan travel days, practice days and book your tee times for the three-day November layover in Florida well before the season begins. You know which team you’ll be facing, and then which team you’ll be facing after that. You know that you’ll lose some games and hopefully win a bunch more. You know that a handful of those games will be against the best teams in the league, and that a whole bunch more will be against the bottom-feeders. The rest will be against teams that are solid, but not great. You know, in short, what to expect and when to expect it.
Second, though it seems obvious to say, the stakes in the regular season are low. This applies especially to the Sharks (and the Senators of old). When you’re reasonably sure, before the first puck has been dropped, that you’ll be in the playoffs come April, it doesn’t matter so much if you drop a home game that you should have won — or even if you somehow steal a game you had no business winning. It’ll all balance out and you’ll be there at the end.

Finally, there’s time to fix things. If someone gets hurt, they have time to heal. If the goalie implodes, you can send him home for a week or two to get his head on straight. If the team stinks out the joint, you can fire the coach. And any glaring weakness can be addressed at the trade deadline, which is only a few weeks before the end of the regular season.

So yeah, the regular season is competitive professional hockey, and it would certainly be difficult to predict the outcome of every game. But … it’s a known. It’s expected, it’s familiar and there is a fairly large margin for error.

It’s not a dangerous business and you — assuming you’re a professional who has been playing hockey his entire life — certainly don’t have to go very far out of your door.

The playoffs, though, are unique. Moreso in hockey than in any other sport, they are a dangerous business; a chaotic arena where anything can happen in an instant and the smallest twitch of a skate or bump in the ice can set in motion events that can destroy a team’s season.

“The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail. But hope remains, if friends stay true.”

Unlike football, basketball, baseball or soccer, where one team tends to control the play (by virtue of possessing the ball at the time) a large part of a hockey game is spent with the puck in nobody’s possession, as it flips and rolls down the ice into the zone, gets tangled among several feet along the boards and careens off the glass and down the ice, waiting to be recovered by the first man who can reach it.

That’s the unexpected. The unknown. You can go to where you think it will be, but it won’t always be there. You don’t even get it back after you give up a goal. You have to win a battle every time you want to possess the puck.

In the regular season, where thousands upon thousands of these battles are fought over months — between some players who know they’ll be in the playoffs, and some players who know they won’t be there — it all tends to even out.

But in the playoffs, the one battle you lose could be the one that kills you. If you’re not prepared for the unexpected, if you’re not willing to face that kind of unknown, you’ll be paralyzed. And then you’ll lose every battle. And then you’ll go home, muttering cliches about how you “didn’t get the bounces”.

Or if you’re Sharks coach Todd McLellan yesterday: “We just didn’t get the puck luck we needed.”

You’re never going to get all the puck luck you need if you’re worried about the puck luck. Thinking about how chaotic and fraught with danger every bounce of the puck can be will leave you so tight you won’t be able to hit an open net.

The puck is going to bounce. You’re going to win some of those bounces and lose them, and McLellan is right that a lot of them will be lucky.

The key thing, in both the hero’s journey and the Quest For The Cup (I probably owe the NHL royalties for typing it with caps like that) comes from embracing the unknown. It’s only when Frodo and the other hobbits find their sense of adventure, when Harry Potter just makes the damn broomstick fly without worrying about the proper way to do it and when Neo looks up at a room of strange people and announces “I know Kung Fu”, that the heroes are able to be effective in their endeavours.

The Sharks faltered the last few weeks of the regular season. So did the Detroit Red Wings. It was only natural on the part of both teams, having long ago locked up home-ice advantage in the playoffs.

But, the difference is, the Sharks felt that to let up, even for a game or two, would cost them as they prepared to launch into the great unknown. They worked hard through the last weeks, losing more than they would have liked, but doing it with the utmost concentration and Very Serious Looks on all their players’ faces.

“If we want to go into the playoffs with a half-hearted effort and we think we’ll turn the switch on, I don’t think that can happen,” said coach McLellan.

They didn’t take any lighthearted moments to remember what they love about the game and why they should be fighting for it — an essential element of any literary hero preparing to go into battle. There’s a reason that Frodo is shown laughing and cavorting in the Shire, and later in Bree, Rivendell and Lothlorien. Moments of untroubled glee are a necessary part of preparing to enter the underworld for a struggle against the unknown.

They were deadly serious all the time and now they can’t loosen up when they desperately need a light moment.

The Red Wings — and I would normally hate to use my favourite team as such a homerific example, but they’re perfect here — on the other hand, allowed themselves a deep breath before the plunge.

“We were a little bored at the end of the season,” said Chris Osgood. “That sounds bad, but it’s honest. We were looking forward to playoffs 100%. We couldn’t wait to get through that last month. I was actually shocked by how many wins we got in March.”

“It’s good we got this over with and no one got hurt in these last two games,” Detroit coach Mike Babcock said. “We get a day off tomorrow and get prepared. It’s not like we haven’t been through it before. We understand what it takes and how hard it is going to be.”

And that’s the difference. The Sharks never took a breath. They’ve been playing as hard as they can all year under the comforting umbrella of the expected regular season. They stressed over the way they were playing in the leadup to the playoffs, and the looming uncertainty made it even more important to be playing as well as possible going into the fray.

Now they’re facing the unknown without a blueprint for handling it. They’ve got a few seasons of failures in their head and no recent success to draw upon. They also don’t have a reserve to dip into and … well … there’s not a lot left.

Right now, if you offered Joe Thornton the blue pill, he’d swallow that motherfucker in a minute.