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This coming St. Patrick’s Day, it will be 21 years since I wrote my first sports column for the Montreal Gazette. Not once in all that time have I had this thought:

“The Canadiens could win the Stanley Cup.”

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Until now, that is.

Anyone who has watched this team come together over the course of the season, anyone who saw the professional, night-at-the-office way the Canadiens won the three games they played last week, has to be thinking the same thing with 20 games to play.

This team can win it all. Never mind making the Eastern Conference final. Never mind getting a toe into the Stanley Cup final for the first time since 1993. This team could go all the way.

Which is not to say that they will. There’s many a slip twixt the Cup and the lip, as they say. We’re talking about the absolute unpredictability of sport here. The Canadiens could be swept in the first round. They could stagger into the second round and fall in five games. They could run into another Chris Kreider accidentally on purpose barrelling into the best goaltender in the game. They could meet that poked, angry bear in Boston in the first round — and learn the hard way that the worst thing you can do is to underestimate an old adversary.