RALEIGH -- By the time the last home game of the season had concluded Thursday night, the announcement earlier in the day that the Carolina Hurricanes would host the next All-Star Game at the RBC Center clearly passed for the best news of the year.
It really shouldn't have been that way. A season that began with the team playing its way out of playoff contention and concluded with the team playing its way out of contention for a top draft pick is coming to an end Saturday, and far too soon.
The 41st and final game of the season in Raleigh, a 5-2 win over the Montreal Canadiens, featured an Eric Staal hat trick when Staal wasn't busy setting up Chad LaRose for two of his own. But no matter how well the Hurricanes might be playing, they won't be back until next fall.
"At the end of the game, you hope you still have two months of hockey ahead, but it's not," Hurricanes forward Jussi Jokinen said. "It's tough to take."
The sugar helping that bitter medicine down was the big news of the afternoon. The cheers inside the arena for LaRose's headfirst dive toward the net for his first and Staal's empty netter for his third - were significantly louder but no more meaningful than those outside the arena more than seven hours earlier, when NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman declared to a throng of sun-swept fans that the 2011 All-Star Game would be held here in only nine months. The commissioner soaked up the applause with palpable glee.
"I'll keep going," Bettman said. "I don't generally hear that."
For a fan base promised an All-Star Game while buying season tickets in 2001 and not expecting it to take a decade to materialize, the news is worth celebrating. Ironically enough, it arrived on the same day as the last home game of a season that offered too little to celebrate.
From the sky-high expectations that naturally followed last season's run through the playoffs to the Dante's-fifth-circle lows of that early 14-game losing streak to the 21-9-3 record since Staal took over as captain, the Hurricanes yanked their fans to and fro enough to attract personal-injury lawyers.
They paid for it at the box office, too: The Hurricanes averaged 15,241 fans per game, down almost 9 percent from last season and the fewest since 2003-04. Winning some games down the stretch with a team weighted heavily toward promising youngsters probably kept those attendance figures from being even worse, but it didn't help with the draft lottery.
Depending on how the final weekend of the season shakes out, the Hurricanes might have as much as an 8.1 percent chance of sneaking into the top spot Tuesday or as little as a 2.7 percent chance at moving up to the No. 4 pick. More likely, the Hurricanes will pick somewhere between fifth and ninth.
If only this franchise could put together back-to-back playoff seasons, it might never have to worry about selling tickets again.
Alas, that's happened just once. The team's biggest successes - 2002, 2006, 2009 - were all followed by disappointment. If long playoff runs are the No. 1 component of the Hurricanes' team culture, squandering that momentum isn't far behind.
So instead of the playoffs - and there's nothing better than a playoff game at the RBC Center - the Hurricanes and the NHL delivered the All-Star Game as a consolation prize.
It's nowhere close to the postseason, and it won't have the same impact on next season that a top-two draft pick could, but as consolation prizes go, it's not bad.
