The protracted playoffs have been running since April 22, and The News & Observer has been there every step of the way, following the Carolina Hurricanes. There has been Canes coverage in the paper every day since -- 42 straight days and counting as of Saturday.

For the swelling body of Canes fans, this has been hockey heaven. But for those still immune to Canes fever, it has been too much of a not good thing. "I am soooo fed up with all of the coverage of the Hurricanes," a reader wrote me Thursday.

The coverage has been nothing short of astounding. The Sports section has had three to four pages of coverage, sometimes much more, every day. The Canes contagion has spread outside Sports to Business, Life, Etc. and especially the front page (20 of 42 days), where we've seen stories and photos ranging from the flap over ticket prices to the history of the Canes' name. You could find out how to make your own Stanley Cup (partly out of potted meat cans) by reading the feature section on May 10.

Is all this coverage justified? Yes, says Sports editor Sherry Johnson, who says the hoopla is about not just a few hockey games but the Triangle's only major league sports team playing for arguably the most storied championship trophy in sports. Front-page editor Eric Frederick says the coverage in part is an education process "for a community not familiar with hockey. So it's important for us to help them understand it, and to see how the presence of a major-league team is changing our community."

The playoffs have presented the Sports department with challenges. One is the protracted length of the championships -- four best-of-seven series to win the cup. That means the paper has to gear up for each game as if it were the last, Johnson said, then meet or exceed that standard for the next game.

Another challenge is to address the diverging interests of readers in a young hockey town. "In this market, you have the challenge of not only taking care of the people who know and appreciate hockey but also having coverage for people who are only lately interested and get engaged because everyone's talking about it," Johnson said. For the diehards, there are player profiles, opinion columns and, recently, enhanced statistical information. For the uninitiated, there are primers on hockey terminology and rules and a "Canes for kids" feature that, one editor said, probably is read more by adults than youngsters.

To feed the hockey beast, Sports has deployed a force of five staffers for all away games and more at home, and that doesn't count the editors, page designers and artists back in the office

I wondered how many people the paper really was serving with this groaning board of coverage, so I surveyed The N&O's Reader Advisory Panel of 300 or so readers. Of the 156 who responded, 86 said they were following the coverage, 70 were not. That's a 55-45 split, which is a pretty high interest level for a sport that doesn't involve a bouncing round ball.

Many of the happy camp have been brought to the Canes by the coverage. "I don't know squat about hockey and have never followed it," said Jean DeSaix of Chapel Hill. "But these days when I bring in The N&O, the first thing I do is pull out the Sports section to see if they won. I have no idea where this interest came from, but I'm reading more about the Canes than I did about the Heels -- almost."

Main gripes of the disenchanted were that the coverage displaced "real news" on the front page and pushed other sporting news into the nether reaches of the Sports section. The NBA playoffs were on page 7C of the Thursday paper.

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