Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

Up until the final 40 minuets of the series, there was little to separate the top-seeded Bulls from the Wolves.

The Belleville Bulls had no problem dispatching the Sudbury Wolves, at least for the last 40 minutes.

If you had only tuned in for the home team's 6-1 victory on Monday night, you'd never have guessed that this had been, in fact, an unusually tight series between the Eastern Conference's top-seed and an outfit that backed into the playoffs. If you looked at the game summary and 50-28 margin in shots, you'd have assumed it had been no contest.

But, then again, if you had caught any of the previous games or even if you only knew that Monday night's game was No. 6 in this opening-round series, you'd have known that it only started to look easy around the time of the first intermission Monday night.

"Either team could have won the first four games of the series," said George Burnett, the Bulls' much-relieved coach.

Burnett spoke the truth. The Bulls' three victories in those first four games were narrow and they ended up catching a break or two. The only game that was one-sided was Sudbury's 6-2 victory in Game 5, which featured four goals by Matt Diaz.

Truth is, the last couple of weeks might have been as bad as any stretch for the Bulls this season. A couple of factors contributed to the struggle.

A flu bug went through the team -- if you've had the most recent strain going around, you know how unpleasant that would have been.

Booking a home show at the Yardmen Arena meant Games 3, 4 and 5 were skedded for Sudbury. "We were in a hotel for five days," goaltender Mike Murphy said. "We were going a little crazy. And Sudbury is a tough place to play. The fans there are probably the toughest in the league."

Just as likely, though, is a bit of fatigue, psychological more so than physical. The Bulls had to run all the balls the last few weeks of the season to lock up home ice in the conference playoffs. They managed to hold off Brampton for the top seed but weren't pointing to an opening-round series vs., well, whatever straggler washed up in the eighth seed.

For the first 12 minutes Monday night there didn't seem to be anything to choose between the Bulls and Wolves. It was something like a fight between two counter-punchers. No stretch passes were to be had. No odd-man rushes. Not a crack for light to pour through. Which is to say, more of the same. Shots were seven-all at that point and there wasn't any picking between the teams.

Form finally held just after the 12-minute mark. Sudbury was taking play to the Bulls and had a couple of scoring chances around Murphy's cage when the puck came to Wolves defenceman Daniel Maggio inside the blueline. The visitors had generated a couple of glorious chances walking in from the point. This time, though, Maggio turned the puck over and the Bulls' first line -- Eric Tangradi, Bryan Cameron and Luke Pither -- broke up the ice. The Wolves netminder Andrew Loverock was able to stop the first shot and the second. On a third crack at it on the same possession, Cameron beat him. One-zip.

You could feel the game getting away from the Wolves right at that point. Maggio took a penalty for checking from behind on his next shift and Sudbury was in cover-up mode the rest of the period. When Brandon Mashinter scored in the last minute of the first, if you listened hard you could hear Sudbury's bus starting up and a phone rang in a motel in Belleville canceling the Wolves' reservation. (I got a busy signal the first couple of times I tried.)

Thereafter the visitors looked finally like a team that registered 21 fewer wins than the hosts in the regular season.

How did Bulls coach George Burnett account for such a close series? After the game he paid respect to the Wolves -- "a strong team that played hard" -- that maybe his players didn't pay going into Game 1. More to the point, however, he said that a post-season series gives coaches a chance to make adjustments. (That has to be all the more true when you're getting a series stretched out because of the scheduling conflicts.) Key among the adjustments that Sudbury coach Mike Foligno made were on the penalty kill -- the Bulls, with the league's sixth best PP, were 3-for-26 going into Monday night's game. Give Foligno credit: He got the Wolves to buy in when anyone looking at the schedule would be reluctant to purchase. And Loverock surely deserves the game.

Maybe this tight series was a splash of water that the Bulls need going into the playoffs. If Niagara wins Tuesday in Game 7 of the series vs. Ottawa, the IceDogs will open in Belleville Thursday against a team they haven't beaten in four tries this year. If Ottawa wins, then the Bulls will open at home against a Mississauga St Mike's team that has beaten Belleville three times in four tries this season. If the series with Sudbury is a measure, it just might be that the less likely the opponent poses more danger to the Bulls. That or over-confidence.

Things that fell out of my notebook … It's a sorry comment on my social life that I was able to watch the last four periods of the Mississauga-Barrie game Saturday night from the comfort of my living room couch. Not until 12:15 did I see a goal. The game ended not long before the sixth intermission break. St Mike's 4, Barrie 3; Mississauga with the series win four games to one. Amazing stuff. A look at the stats sheet tells a lot of the story. The goaltending was spectacular -- Peter Di Salvo with 84 saves in the loss, JP Anderson with 68 saves in the win. Mississauga defenceman Cameron Gaunce spurred the comeback from 0-3 with two goals in the second period. Devante Smith Pelly scored the winner on a wrap-around. What the summary doesn't show: Di Salvo just couldn't bring himself to stand up. His teammates had to lift him; Casey Cizikas diving head-first into his own net to sweep out a puck that had beaten Anderson and was just about to cross the goal line; skaters on two-on-ones just struggling to stand up, never mind generating a scoring chance; Gaunce too tired to talk coherently to an interviewer after the game, joking about his dedication to condition seeing him through what had to be about 90 minutes of ice time. My favorite moment in the broadcast came during an intermission after an overtime period: The feed of the game cut away to what looked like a security camera installed in a television studio and stayed there for a couple of minutes ... until some harried guy ran through the picture to flip a switch and get the feed back on the air. It was like an OHL game with a DVD extra.