Welter: The Canes have climbed a long way, it's okay to stop and enjoy the view

By Pat Welter, WRAL sports multimedia journalist

When you've pulled off the best regular season in Hurricane's history, you should expect to make it out of the first round. Heck, let's be real this team expects to win the Stanley Cup, but this first round felt different. It's probably because it went seven games....against Boston, a team who had eliminated Carolina two of the last three post seasons. Head coach Rod Brind'Amour seemed to agree.

"It's such a different feeling coming into this one," Brind'Amour said after beating Boston 3-2 to advance to round two of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. "I think back to the other ones, if we would have won you guys might have been a little surprised. This time around it felt like this was our time."

I saw Brind'Amour shake Brad Marchand's hand after the game and give him a smile. Marchand has been a pest to the Canes for years. He scored four goals and had eleven points in this series. Best recognizes best.

"We knew it was gonna be a tough battle, but we also knew that if we got through this team, we would make a deep run," Marchand said after the game. "I think this is probably the toughest group to come out of the East with this group. We were hoping to beat them."

That's quite the complement from a guy who Canes fans boo every single time he touches the puck. Marchand has won a Stanley Cup and been to another final. He knows as well as anyone what it takes.

Of all the professional post seasons the Stanley Cup Playoffs are arguably the most grueling. They are like the Mount Everest of playoffs. From the cold ice, to the physical toll. Sometimes looking up at it all can be daunting even to a coach who has climbed the mountain before.

"Sometimes getting through the first round is actually the toughest," Brind'Amour explained. "Because it's so emotional and then it kind of, the next round will be emotional, but then I think it kind of dies down a little bit as you go along. Getting through this round is huge."

Getting through this round was crucial because Brind'Amour knows they needed to do it. The window to win has arrived. As my colleague at ESPN 99.9 The Fan, Joe Ovies pointed out on his show "The OG: with Ovies and Giglio" this week it's time to talk about the Canes like we talk about other teams in this market. If they had lost Saturday this season would have been a failure.

"If you're going to transform the culture, if you're going to transform how we talk about the Carolina Hurricanes it's not about just happy to be here," Ovies said. "It's not about 'hey good job man maybe next time'. No this was next time."

The Hurricanes didn't lose Saturday, so we don't need to have that conversation...yet. The team should be applauded for their regular season accomplishments and the last four seasons they've had that followed a nine year playoff drought. But anything short of a Stanley Cup should be viewed as a disappointment, because this team is good enough to win. That doesn't mean anyone needs to get fired, it's just the new standard that Brind'Amour and GM Don Waddell have set.

"You hire the best person to coach your team and you let him coach," Waddell said when I asked him about his relationship with Brind'Amour before the playoffs began. "I never ask him why aren't you practicing tomorrow or why aren't you doing this. He knows what the team needs, I don't need to worry about that. In any relationship it's communication. As long as you have that open dialogue of communication, I always say small problems dealt with go away, small problems not deal with become big problems."

"I don't know how it was before, I was never a head coach before," Brind'Amour said to the same question before the playoffs. "To be able to talk to our GM and our owner about players 'this is the kind of guy I want or I want this guy, I want to keep this guy'. There's a definite they are listening. The communication part, but the understanding of what we are all trying to do has been really great."

If the Hurricanes had lost to Boston we'd be criticizing them for not doing enough at the trade deadline or for not having enough stars. Instead Waddell and Brind'Amour look like geniuses. Virtually every move they made from last year to this one has payed off. Waddell replaced Dougie Hamilton with Tony DeAngelo. He traded goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic to Detroit. Freddie Andersen was a Vezina Trophy candidate when healthy, Antti Raanta has been stellar in his place. Max Domi was their only addition at the trade deadline and he's the game seven hero. I like to gamble, but even I wouldn't bet on that parlay. Of course those bets weren't made in a vaccuum (I think I used that phrase right???). Carolina's player personnel decisions are more likely to work out because the team has created a winning culture.

"What we've built here is the way we've played since game one," Captain Jordan Staal said after game seven. "It's the way we want to play, whether it's a game seven or the 50th game of the season [Brind'Amour] says the same thing. It's the desire to play hard and play for each other and bring it."

I think about the Mt. Everest - Stanley Cup analogy probably because there's so much climbing content out there right now. The documentaries "Free Solo" and "The Alpinist" are riveting. 18-year-old Lucy Westlake just became the youngest American woman to climb Everest. There's something incredibly compelling about watching someone climb an impossible height, especially when they don't have the protection of ropes. The people that chase these peaks are always looking for the next summit, but you can't get there without focusing on each individual step. The time to criticize the Hurricanes will come as soon as they lose their footing, but it hasn't arrived yet. The franchise has climbed a long way, it's okay to appreciate the view.