Everybody's doing the math, it's not rocket science to see what it means. ? We've already lost Nikolai Khabibulin and now it's going to be a big challenge to get Marty signed.

The Internet's been so great, and it's so nice to have fans do nice, elaborate websites, but I think the downside is some of the things... for real fans to go on and see that 90 percent of the information isn't true or to see pictures that aren't really me, or for them to be able to sell these things, that's one of the downsides, I think.

In the NHL these days, you don't get surprised by too much. When we went and got Cory Stillman , you could kind of see it coming that something might not work out. We still had hopes that they would get both of them signed -- that would've been really good. That's the business of hockey right now, and other teams go through the same thing every year.

We've never been the eighth seed, obviously. It's going to be different. We're not going to worry about what happened two years ago. We're just going to worry about our team now.

It's been one of those years. We feel now that finally we got in, we can start over here hopefully and try to do something.

It was tough to get our emotional level up all day.