Playoffs

We are 3 games deep into playoffs (and no speech about the epicness of playoffs weird I know...)... and down 2-1 to Renon in (already) the semi-finals on account of only 4 teams making playoffs... with 4 making playdowns*... A 7 game series usually plays out as two home games for the higher ranked team... two home games for the lower ranked team... and then 1, 1, and 1... but our odd system has us playing every other game home and away... So far we've played away (loss), home (win), and away (loss)... with tomorrow another game at home...
In my limited experience with playoffs it's usually the smallest differences that win or lose a game for you... and eventually the series... every faceoff is magnified... every turnover glaring back at you in the next day's video session... and every strategy and lineup mulled over incessently by maniacal, pacing, giant ball of stress resembling (very faintly) your ordinary everyday run-of-the-mill coach...
Guts can take you a long way... courage can take you a long way... desire can take you a long way... but I will say it again like I've said it before (except this time a borrowed quote from a highly recommendable book called The Power of One that states...) "First the head then the heart"...
...You need both...
... of the two everyone seems to value the heart because of the two it seems more human... and also because the value placed on it in romantic novels... but take a page out of English 10B... most every tragedy has this very heart as the heroe's fatal flaw... heart can take a wheel around the net pass to the winger at the hash-marks only so far against a 2-3 forecheck that pinches the walls... and it's no use ranting on and on about how much we do or do not want to win when the stats tell us we had 17 turnovers and over 20 minutes in penalties...

*Playdowns is a nasty sort of thing... I've always thought that playoffs takes mental toughness... at worst you have the excuse of a mediocre year to fall back on... this makes it easy it is to let up just enough to lose, go home, finally get some rest, and enjoy the ski hill until you fly home to enjoy the summer... that is the barrier to be overcome in playoffs... But you have the added incentive of money, of memories, of battling it out in some sort of survival of the fittest that lends you a desire to win... and some esoteric idea that you may never have this chance again and you don't want to look back on it and regret (... esoteric because although common knowledge tells us that we are all going to die and thus should pursue the present... we rarely are in a position like this to think about it...)...
...But a part of me thinks that playdowns might actually be the harder of the two mental tests... you are no longer playing for a bonus, or a championship or anything... you are playing a game that means nothing... you are merely playing to go home earlier... to be the slightly better of the two losers... and thus all you are playing for is pride... You lose in playoffs and you keep a small sense of it... you lose in playdowns and that sense takes a while to come back... in playdowns there is more to lose... and thus of the two sides of our bracket... I would expect the playdowns maybe to be even more intense than the playoffs...