A season of commitment and excellence can and for most does unravel in 60 minutes or so on the national stage. All the planning by management and toil by teenagers through seven-game playoff series can crash down so fast that it makes old and young heads spin.

That’s just the nature of the MasterCard Memorial Cup. And that’s the essence of tonight’s matchup between the Kelowna Rockets and Rimouski Oceanic, champions of their respective leagues this season who have but a single loss to show for their trip to Quebec. One of them will skate off the ice tonight with the awful prospect that, without help, without a lucky break beyond their control, they could have just one lousy game left in their otherwise excellent season.

There could be fairer ways to determine a champion for the CHL. Back in the old days, you had best-of-seven series all the way to the trophy raising. No doubt, you could say that the best team won and that the losing side had its fair shot at it.

You could even say a single-game knockout, say the knockout round of the Olympics, is fairer. At least you know you are masters of your destiny going into any game. At least you know there’s no margin for error. As awful a prospect as it might seem, one bad shift, one bad bounce and, yeah, one bad call, has the trumpeter blowing Taps.

The Memorial Cup’s four-team round-robin is wonky, no doubt — you have a margin for error but not much. It’s not necessarily over when you’ve played your last game in the round-robin — it can be like waiting for all the votes to come in from faraway precincts on election night.

So the loser of Kelowna-Rimouski game can say, well, if it’s not over, it sure isn’t looking good.

Talk to NHL scouts who during the regular season saw all four teams and pretty much to a man they’ll say the Rockets were easily the most talented team to make the trip to Quebec. Most would say that their only rival for top dog in the CHL was Sault Ste. Marie and that the game they really longed to see would have been Kelowna versus the Greyhounds. The Soo, however, ran into Connor McDavid and the Erie Otters and melted down in the Western Conference final.

Even in Kelowna’s opening game loss to host Quebec you could see how the Rockets would rank up there in major junior’s elite. Leon Draisaitl looked like the second-best talent in the CHL, eclipsed only by his (barring trade) future Edmonton Oilers teammate, McDavid. Draisaitl looked like a dominating presence on the cycle — in contrast to McDavid who weaves and dances at speed until he breaks the ankles of defenders in a one-on-one matchup, Draisaitl just keeps his body between the defender and the puck and either can spot his wingers in his peripheral vision or intuitively make an area pass. He started the season with the Oilers, one of the club’s many disastrous decisions — Draisaitl himself was unequivocal about needing another season in major junior when I spoke to him at the combine last year. Edmonton’s decision to send him back in mid-season was the last good decision by the neutered-if-not-quite-punted management team that preceded the arrival of Peter Chiarelli.

Kelowna paid a big price to Prince Albert to pick up Draisaitl and defenceman Josh Morrissey, who starred for Canada at the world juniors. When the Rockets ran roughshod over a strong Brandon team, sweeping the Wheat Kings in the WHL final, the price for two elite talents looked fully worthwhile. But a loss to Rimouski tonight might have Rockets fans re-calculating the cost on the deal, especially if this turns out to be the penultimate game of the season.

For Rimouski’s part, even if the Oceanic were barely outscored 4-3 by Oshawa, the Quebec league champs were thoroughly outplayed and outshot 37-22 by the Generals. You need your goaltender to be one of your best players if not the best in this tournament but too often it felt like netminder Phillippe Desrosiers was the Oceanics only player. It might have been the Ontario champs, who beat McDavid and Erie in five games, were coming into the tournament a little more rested than Rimouski, winners of a knock-down-drag-out seven-games-plus-overtime series against Quebec. I doubt that fatigue really played into the result. The Generals’ size was likely the defining factor. Desrosiers couldn’t see the points for the trees, Oshawa’s Hunter Smith the most conspicuous of them and the scorer of the winner late in the third period. Samuel Morin, the towering defender, a Philadelphia first-rounder, might have more luck in trying to move the Rockets’ smaller forwards and it will be interesting to see if he matches up against Draisaitl.

It’s the goofy nature of the tournament that these two teams can’t be sure of how their tournament will play out. The winner will play another day and at least another after that. The loser might, with help, get into a tiebreak game and run the table from there, as Windsor did in Rimouski in ’09. The only team that might know its fate going forward is Oshawa — the Generals would be guaranteed a place in the final if Rimouski wins.