There is considerable anticipation the Wild’s 15th season will end on Friday night in Dallas. If so, it would be a 4-1 defeat in games and result in the Wild’s fourth first-round dismissal in seven playoff appearances.

As a franchise, the Wild receives a pass for the first two seasons (2000-02) as an expansion team, and the highlight of its existence remains the upset run to the Western Conference finals in 2002-03.

Two seasons of working toward competitiveness, and then a first playoff appearance that became a testimony to Jacques Lemaire’s mastery as a coach and the iron will of his odd collection of veterans, vagabonds and Marian Gaborik.

There were eight playoff victories vs. Colorado and Vancouver that spring, before being swept at the hands of Anaheim.

Let’s start from there. The Wild has had 12 seasons since losing the expansion excuse with that playoff run.

There has been an ownership change, a front office change and three coaches to follow Lemaire. Yet, the way I see it, you can divide those 12 seasons thusly:

BPS (Before Parise Suter) and APS (After Parise Suter).

The Wild made the playoffs twice in the eight seasons played from the fall of 2003 through the spring of 2012. They were eliminated in the first round in both 2007 and 2008, going 3-8 against Anaheim and Colorado.

The Skating Ws were on a four-season streak of not reaching the playoffs at the end of 2011-12. It was Mike Yeo’s first year as coach and the Wild went from an outstanding 30-game start to being as unwatchable as an NHL squad can get.

That Wild team scored 166 non-shootout goals – an average of 2.02 per game. It was dreadful. Tickets were going unsold, and more importantly, unused. When season tickets stop getting used, they next will stop being purchased.

The Twins found that out during the steady declines in season tickets that followed the lousy seasons of 2011 to 2014.

There wasn’t as much anger over the Wild’s putrid 2011-12 as disinterest. Finally, after more than a decade of ownership feeding in tall clover, it was over.

The Wild was finding out how the Wolves and the Twins had been forced to operate: calling up customers, begging them to renew season tickets, offering sweeteners if they did so.

And then owner Craig Leipold authorized General Manager Chuck Fletcher to pull the trigger on 13-year, $98 million twin contracts for the prizes of 2012 free agency, left wing Zach Parise and defenseman Ryan Suter.

It was July 4, 2012. There was another lockout that reduced the regular season to 48 games. When play resumed, there were a few non-sellouts early on, but basically, the Xcel Energy Center has been sold out to beyond capacity on a nightly basis since Parise and Suter joined the roster.

The Wild, a franchise that had three previous playoff seasons, has had four straight in the Parise/Suter Era. The St. Paulites have won two playoff series – over Colorado in 2014 and St. Louis last season – to equal the number of playoff series won previously (both in 2003).

And yet we can hear and read that those enormously long contracts signed by Parise and Suter might have been ill-advised, that the inability to generate a strong run toward the Stanley Cup makes those signings something of a failure for the Wild.

Not exactly.

Without the signings of Suter and Parise, the Wild’s streak of non-playoff seasons would be eight and the arena atmosphere in St. Paul would be as languid as it has been for the Timberwolves for nearly all of the current streak of 12 non-playoff seasons.

Just now, with Karl-Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins and a new coach, Tom Thibodeau, there is actual hope in Minneapolis, even if the playoffs remain only a notion and not a given.

There are many people angry, or at least agitated, over this Wild team that they see as underachievers.

Anger or agitation among the fan base is OK, because it means there is interest.

The signings of Parise and Suter saved the Wild from a much worse fate: overwhelming apathy.

That’s exactly what the Wild would be facing at this moment, if not for Leipold’s mighty move on July 4, 2012.

There’s nothing worse for a sports franchise than overwhelming apathy.

Ask Glen Taylor. That’s why he made a mighty move this week -- $8 million annually for Thibodeau and another $2 mllion for his hand-picked general manager – for one reason:

To give a young, talented nucleus the best possible shot to create enough excitement to end the apathy.