For the Blackhawks, sweeping the Wild satisfying but only means they're halfway there

ST. PAUL, Minn. – The horn sounded Thursday night, and the Chicago Blackhawks held on for a 4-3 win and a second-round sweep of the Minnesota Wild. They celebrated. They shook hands. They ducked into the dressing room, where they whooped and hollered to music.

For a few minutes.

“Congratulations,” a team official told Jonathan Toews.

“Thanks,” Captain Serious said – and walked away.

Seven years ago, it was different. As coach Joel Quenneville said: “Nothing was proven at that time. Nobody had won, and nobody had gotten there. So it was a trial-and-error thing.”

Now the Blackhawks have been there, done that. They have made the Western Conference final three years in a row and five out of the past seven years, and they won the Stanley Cup in 2010 and 2013.

Not every one has been with the team the whole time like Toews, Niklas Hjalmarsson, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook and Patrick Sharp. But many have been around a while now, and those who haven’t follow the example the others set.

“Coming in here, you know the expectations are high,” said center Andrew Desjardins, who came to the Blackhawks from the San Jose Sharks at the trade deadline. “Guys have been through it, and guys know what it takes. I think that rubs off on everybody else. I think that’s just the Blackhawk mentality.”

And so the music went off, and the room went quiet, and the doors opened to the media, and the players were all business. No one thumped his chest about beating the Wild for the third year in a row and not trailing the entire series. No one talked about the opportunity to be the first team in the salary-cap era to win the Cup three times.

The Blackhawks had the same opportunity a year ago. They played an epic conference final with the Los Angeles Kings, and the difference was a deflection in overtime of Game 7. A shot went off a body, fluttered in the air and fell behind goaltender Corey Crawford.

“It was the worst ending you could ever get,” Quenneville said.

It got even worse when the Kings went on to become the second team in the cap era to win the Cup twice, matching the Blackhawks, taking away their distinction.

“We were in this position before last year,” Keith said. “So I think that alone gives us motivation, knowing that we didn’t get past the next round.”

The Blackhawks are not unbeatable. They have a problem on defense. Michal Rozsival suffered a gruesome injury Thursday night when he tried to pivot in the neutral zone, his left skate caught in the ice and his foot turned backward.

Rozsival is 36. He is not an elite player. But he was playing on the top pair with Keith and logging around 18 minutes a game, and the Blackhawks were basically using five defensemen regularly with 40-year-old Kimmo Timonen playing sparingly.

Now Timonen will have to play at least a little more, and David Rundblad or Kyle Cumiskey probably will dress. Rundblad is decent offensively but poor defensively. Cumiskey adds bite but has been up and down from the minors virtually his whole career and has only six games of NHL playoff experience.

Not good.

Still, after an up-and-down first-round series with the Nashville Predators, the Blackhawks seemed to find their game against the Wild. Crawford, who had been benched, settled down. The team allowed only seven goals in four games, two of them in a mad scramble in the final 2 ½ minutes Thursday night. The offensive stars shined.

Look at the Blackhawks’ playoff scoring leaders, and you see their core: Kane has seven goals and 13 points. Toews has four and 11. Keith has two and 10. Sharp has four and nine. Marian Hossa finally scored his first goal in 22 playoff games Thursday night when he got an empty-netter, but he has eight points and has played his usual complete game.

The Blackhawks have won eight of their last nine playoff series, and that loss, again, came on a deflection in overtime of Game 7 of the conference final against the eventual Stanley Cup champions last year.

“If you’re going to beat them,” said Wild coach Mike Yeo, 3-12 against them in the playoffs the past three years, “you have to be on top of your game.”

Keith didn’t smile as he peeled off his equipment Thursday night. Sharp didn’t seem too proud as he unlaced his skates and said returning to the conference final was “something to be proud about.”

“A little more reserved, a little more businesslike,” Sharp said. “Still have the same enthusiasm. Maybe we just don’t show it as much as we did back in 2009, 2010. We still have the desire to win. We feel like we’ve been through it a few times, and we’re more even-keeled, I guess you could say.”

Kane reclined against the wall, arms crossed, and said the Blackhawks were never satisfied. But he wasn’t talking about hoisting another Cup or making another conference final or even winning another playoff series.

“I don’t think we think about being special or the end result or anything like that,” Kane said. “I just think if we have a good game the game before, we want to come back and play even better. If we have a bad game, we kind of want to wipe the slate clean and not feel sorry for ourselves, come back and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Crawford spoke so softly in the corner, one pad on, one off, you could hardly hear him recall the loss to L.A.

“Last year we got beat, and this year we’re back, and we’re hungry,” Crawford said. “We’re hungry to win every year.”

Toews and Seabrook sat side by side on the floor against the wall in the hallway outside the dressing room, holding energy drinks, going over scoresheets. There was no need to stop and congratulate them. Not yet.

They’re only halfway there.