They finished 15th in the 27-team league in attendance this season with an average of 3,928 fans per game, down slightly from a year ago but not too far off the league average of 4,252.

For nearly every game this season, part of the upper deck of the iWireless Center has been cordoned off with curtains, reducing the seating capacity to 5,100.

It’s not that the team is horrible (although it has dug an 0-2 hole in this playoff series) and there’s nothing wrong with the way it is being marketed. The current owners seem to know what they’re doing.

But those giddy days of the late 1990s aren’t ever coming back. It was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle, perfect storm sort of scenarios concocted from ingredients that can’t be replicated.

One part of the equation was the novelty of having minor league hockey here. Most people in the Quad-Cities hadn’t seen a hockey game before 1995.

When we suddenly got a franchise in the old CHL, many people bought a ticket just to see what this was about.