Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend's events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Remember last season, when Corey Perry went on a ridiculous run of success and scored 25 goals in 30 games after the All-Star Game and won the Hart and the Ducks ended up finishing fourth in the West?

People forget that the big-time Cinderella run they went on wasn't, in the end, as season-saving as history would lead us to believe. Yes, they were in 11th place on Feb. 24, but that was more like a three-way tie for ninth and, more to the point, just two points behind Calgary for the eighth and final playoff spot. Before the season ended the Ducks picked up 31 points with 15 wins and an overtime loss over the next 21 games.

So what happened this year is that the Ducks started winning in a similar fashion, and everyone started saying this was another story of the Cinderella Ducks, getting back in action.

Which is only half-true.

Yeah, the Ducks went on an unbelievable run from early January through to mid-February, improving from 10-22-6 to 27-25-10. Again, they played to a 17-3-4 record in 23 games, actually improving on their points-per-game pace from the streak a year ago. But the final loss right before the incredible run started came on Jan. 4, when the Ducks were 14th in the West — not tied for ninth — and 19 points back, not two.

So the huge push has certainly improved the team's playoff chances. By the time they suffered two consecutive regulation losses for the first time since the streak began — on Feb. 27 and 29 — to Colorado and Buffalo, they'd leapfrogged just one team in the standings. And as they lost three of their last four, the one win coming against Calgary at Honda Center, where Calgary hasn't won in closing in on 2,500 days, they, not surprisingly, failed to improve upon that position.

This morning, they sit 13th in the West, despite the absurd amount of winning. They're now at least no longer in the double digits as far as their distance from a playoff spot goes. They're seven points behind San Jose for the final playoff spot in the West, but it seems to be breaking down.

(Coming Up: Toews injury worries; the Jeff Carter trade is working; brilliance from Stars, Eriksson; gay players in hockey; big injuries for Flyers, Red Wings; Prust fights Lucic; Adrian Dater hypocrisy; Sabres sweep the West; Don Cherry vs. Brian Burke; and a trade that finds Cory Schneider with the Devils.)

There's a lot to be said, one supposes, for getting "hot" at the right time, and the Ducks clearly didn't do that. They got hot too early, after being cold too long. Win even a quarter of those early losses and the climb back seems a whole hell of a lot more tenable. Heck, get hot two weeks later and we're looking at a legitimate run to a playoff spot that should have the teams Nos. 7-12 in the West really worried about their chances. But midnight has come too early.

Maybe things could have gone a little better on the way to this point. Maybe The Perry-Getzlaf-Ryan trio doesn't start quite so poorly (or in Getzlaf's case, start playing un-poorly at any point in the season). Maybe whatever was wrong with Jonas Hiller gets sorted out a little bit sooner. Maybe Randy Carlyle gets fired right after Thanksgiving — the official point when teams start looking at that sort of thing, we were all told — when the Ducks lost nine of 10.

Doesn't matter now, for all the talk that Anaheim was doing great and Toronto was doomed over the last few weeks, the Leafs were never in as bad a position as the one into which the Ducks placed themselves. In fact, Toronto has more points in fewer games and is closer to an Eastern playoff spot.

They're 5-4-1 in the last 10, and are once again neither scoring nor defending particularly well. The Leafs have to win 23 points from their remaining games 17 to make the East's predicted postseason threshold of 90 points. The West's will be higher that that. Usually it's around 95. Last year it was 97, and they also have more competition for that last spot.

If the Leafs are dead (and believe me, they are), then the Ducks are deader. They need about 29 points from their 16 remaining games. Two losses and their season is almost certainly coming to a premature end.