When you ask people around the game about who might emerge from the the next five months of hockey frenzy, there's always this caveat: too many variables to lock in on one potential Stanley Cup winner.

One personnel director thinks the Vancouver Canucks might have benefited from the lockout and will get their mojo back. And he thinks the Pittsburgh Penguins have another Cup in them.

Many believe the New York Rangers, with Rick Nash aboard, are poised for their first Cup win since 1994. Others believe a Los Angeles Kings team with essentially the same lineup that waltzed through the playoffs with a 16-4 record might be the first team to repeat since Detroit collected rare back-to-back Cups in 1997 and 1998.

One agent's advice was simple: Don't waste any money in Vegas betting on a Cup winner at this stage.

But in a season when goaltending and coaching acumen might be the two most important assets a team possesses, we turn our eyes along the Mississippi and suggest that the Gateway Arch might just be a pretty good place for the St. Louis Blues to host a Stanley Cup parade next June.

It's a mug's game at the best of times, of course, trying to pick a Cup winner before the first shift has been played, let alone at the outset of a season truncated by a labor dispute. But if there is reason to believe in the Blues and their ability to seize this moment and come home with the franchise's first championship, it's because the man who stands behind their bench has been there, done that, and then some.

Ken Hitchcock is the defending coach of the year, after taking over for Davis Payne 13 games into last season. He chalked up 43 wins in 69 games to lead the Blues to their second-best point total in franchise history. The Blues, under Hitchcock, boasted the best defensive record in the NHL. At one point they went 10 straight games without giving up a third-period goal. They went a month without giving up a power-play goal, killing off 51 straight attempts. Hitchcock guided the Blues to a Central Division title, their first since 1999-2000, and he guided them to a first-round playoff victory over San Jose, the team's first playoff series victory since 2002.

And then the Blues ran into the buzz saw that was the Los Angeles Kings and poof ... in four games it was over.

And that moment, that splash of ice-cold water to the face, will be the litmus test for the Blues and whether they are prepared to push that heavy stone even farther up the hill, at the crest of which sits the Stanley Cup.

Hitchcock doesn't know how it will turn out, of course, although he knew weeks before his team was flattened by the Kings that Los Angeles was building toward something special.

"We have to be careful in just expecting to take a step forward because we're a year older," Hitchcock said in a recent interview.

The Central Division (let alone the Western Conference) has a lot of good teams -- teams that have made a habit of winning, teams that have created a culture of success.

"The pedigree of winning is very strong here, and it's not just L.A.," Hitchcock said. "It is really going to be a battle. I think our players understand that right now."

Hitchcock likes to say that there is a line that separates good, which is what the Blues were last season, and great, which is where they want to get to. It is the difference between playing through people and not to people, Hitchcock said.

From about the two-thirds mark last season, Hitchcock noted a change in the way the Kings were approaching games. "I could see a different mentality. They were going through everybody," he said.

There are lots of reasons to be optimistic the Blues can achieve that same kind of change, become that kind of team.

Last season, key players Andy McDonald, Alex Steen, David Perron and Matt D'Agostini were all dealing with concussion issues. This season, all four are healthy. "There's no hesitation in anything that they're doing," Hitchcock said.

The Blues will add promising young prospect Vladimir Tarasenko, but he won't be asked to do anything he's not capable of doing, given the team's depth, and neither will Jaden Schwartz, another young offensive prospect who was the 14th overall pick in the 2010 draft.

On the blue line, the Blues boast one of the game's brightest young defensive stars in Alex Pietrangelo, the fourth overall pick in 2008 who seems destined for Norris Trophy discussion.

Kevin Shattenkirk has blossomed since coming over as part of the trade that sent former No. 1 overall pick Erik Johnson to Colorado in February 2011.

Defensively, the team should again pose problems playing a dedicated but not particularly conservative brand of team defense, a nod to the evolution Hitchcock has undergone as a head coach.

"We don't play defense in a cautious manner," Hitchcock said. "We play defense with a lot of risk sometimes."

But that kind of game -- pressuring, working the entire length of the ice -- requires a full-on buy-in from the players. The buy-in was obvious last season, but the ante is higher now. It has to be.

"There's a difference between buying in and embracing the buy-in," Hitchcock said. "I think you have to see it in the hunger in their eyes, you have to see it in their attention to details."

Between the pipes, the Blues boast the best one-two combination in the NHL last season with Jaroslav Halak and Brian Elliott. The two shared the William Jennings Trophy for allowing the fewest goals in the NHL, and one imagines that they will continue to push each other after combining for 15 shutouts, tying a modern-day mark that was established in 1969-70.