Forsberg, originally drafted by the Flyers, spent his first 10 seasons with the Colorado franchise and helped the Avalanche win two Stanley Cups. He came to the Flyers as a free agent before the 2005-06 season. “Over the last several months, I have worked extremely hard in order for this to be possible. I am looking forward to putting this jersey on again,” Forsberg said in announcing his return.

“I have so many great memories of my playing days in Denver. I’m excited about helping my new teammates and former teammates in the coming weeks, and hopefully I am able to do that in the very near future.”

Forsberg signed a prorated, 1-year deal that binds him to Colorado only for the rest of this season. The deal reportedly is worth $1.1 million. Forsberg has kept several NHL teams on the fence for weeks, including the Flyers, who were considered the front-runners since Forsberg played only 40 games for them last season before being traded to Nashville for Ryan Parent and Scottie Upshall.

Forsberg was seriously considering a return to the Flyers, but with the team’s February collapse, mounting injuries and playoff hopes slipping away, he must have changed his mind. “When you get a guy holding out like that you know he’s looking at the pros and the cons. He probably had it narrowed down to a few teams and when push came to shove we haven’t cut it, basically,” said Scott Hartnell, who played with Forsberg in Nashville last season.

“We’re still in the race,” Hartnell said of the playoffs. “We know that ourselves, even though we lost 10 in a row and we have to bear down. We have lots of injuries and [Mike Richards] being out stinks, but we’ve got to fill that void with some guys stepping up.”
Kimmo Timonen, who was also with Forsberg in Nashville last season, agreed.

“I’m sure he went through all the options he had,” Timonen said. “When I talked to him a couple of months ago he told me either us or Colorado. Obviously, if you look at our team right now we have a lot of injuries and we haven’t won a game in 10 games. “In Colorado they have a lot of injuries. But they look like they’re going to come back now. It’s hard to say, but that’s probably what he was thinking.”

Attending surgeon Sonya Noor said there were no initial signs of brain damage, which is a fear whenever the carotid artery is clamped. She said clamps were in place for about 15 to 20 minutes during surgery, which she considers a short time.

The Lightning and Hurricanes earned top seeds in the Eastern Conference, then beat upstarts from the bottom of the West. Sixth-seeded Calgary got to Game 7 against Tampa Bay, and No. 8 Edmonton repeated the feat versus the Hurricanes.

If another bottom-rung club makes a run, don’t be surprised if it’s a team closer to the Atlantic Ocean instead of the Pacific. “Every team is dangerous,” said 19-year-old Sidney Crosby, from the fifth-seeded Pittsburgh Penguins. “You always look at teams that finish off strong. It’s all about timing.” You don’t have to look any farther than Long Island to see that. The New York Islanders appeared out of the playoff race following noncompetitive losses just over a week ago to powerhouses Buffalo and Ottawa in the aftermath of goalie Rick DiPietro’s concussion.

Yet, they bounced back with four straight wins and eked into the playoffs ahead of Toronto and Montreal on the final day of the season by beating New Jersey in a shootout. Now they have their sights set on top-seeded Buffalo, which earned 113 points and had the NHL’s best record for the first time in team history.

“It’s all about opportunity in this game,” said Islanders forward Ryan Smyth, acquired from Edmonton at the trade deadline. “We didn’t quit, and obviously I was an added extra piece to the puzzle to help the organization get in. That’s all you can ask for as a player is to get in.”

The Rangers earned the No. 6 seed on the strength of a 13-3-4 surge and joined Pittsburgh, the Islanders and second-seeded New Jersey as Atlantic Division teams to qualify. Only Philadelphia, which posted the league’s worst record, was left out of the postseason party. Out West, Detroit again is at the top. The Central Division-winning Red Wings tied the Sabres in points, a season after capturing the Presidents’ Trophy, but failed to repeat because they fell three wins short of the Sabres’ NHL-high 53.

Now they hope to avoid another first-round flameout against Calgary after getting knocked out quickly last year by No. 8 Edmonton. The Flames wrapped up the final berth in the West on the second-to-last night of the season, when Colorado’s comeback ended in a loss to Nashville. If the Red Wings slip up, Pacific champion Anaheim will be ready to step up. No longer Mighty, the Ducks are in the playoffs for the first time as division champions. Their first test is against seventh-seeded Minnesota Wild, and star goalie Niklas Backstrom.

“It’s a toss up,” said defenseman Chris Pronger, in his first season with Anaheim. “Any team can get hot, much like we did last year in Edmonton as the eighth seed.” The Wild hope Backstrom will lead them deep into the postseason. In his first NHL season, Backstrom posted the lowest goals-against average (1.97) and highest save percentage (.929). No team will be relying on inexperienced players more than the Penguins, who will be facing the Ottawa Senators, who often come in with tons of potential but have yet to reach the Stanley Cup finals.

Crosby posted an NHL-best 120 points, including 84 assists, and became the youngest scoring champion in NHL history four months before his 20th birthday. He is the first teenager in major sports history to win a scoring title. If he and rookie Evgeni Malkin can supply the scoring punch, and young goalie Marc-Andre Fleury can stand tall in the nets, the Penguins could be the latest team to spoil the Senators’ postseason plans.

It doesn’t matter that they enter next week’s tournament with a losing record. The Chargers (13-19-3), who won Division 2 championships in 1996 and 1998, mostly go unnoticed outside Huntsville, skating away in a state where most kids grow up flinging footballs instead of chasing pucks and icing is a way to cool down in the summer. In fact, UAH is the only university-sponsored college hockey program south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The Chargers endure long bus rides, such as the 15-hour trek to Des Moines, Iowa, for the conference tournament. They play hockey in a region where only a handful of schools, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia Tech among them, even have club-level teams. Huntsville defenseman Troy Maney is the only player from the state on the UAH roster. The others hail from places like Ontario and British Columbia. The Chargers are used to the skeptical responses from Northern teams and fans. Hockey in Alabama? Come on, y’all.

“A lot of people don’t think we’re Division 1 when they hear about hockey down south,” said center David Nimmo, who scored the winning goal in the championship game against Robert Morris. “They seem to respect us a little bit, anyway. I can’t say they come in there with full respect for us. They think they’re going to beat us.” Robert Morris likely thought so, too, with that 4-0 lead after one period. “We just felt like we were not going to lose,” said Nimmo, who came to Huntsville from St. Albert, Alberta. “It’s hard to grasp what my players have done for this university with their great three-game comeback,” Ross said. “What they did was something very few teams can do.”

Ross, who played on the U.S. team in the 1976 Olympics, reached 500 career wins this season. He announced in January this would be his last season as coach. But he’d rather talk about his players than what all this means to him. “I haven’t really thought about that,” Ross said. “They’re the ones that pulled it off. It’s just a blessing that it all worked out the way it did for the team and for me.” UAH is hardly a fly-by-night success story. The team won four national championships at the club level before joining the NCAA’s Division 2 in 1985. The school was so successful the governor at the time declared Huntsville the “Hockey Capital of the South”, a dubious distinction even in the amateur ranks.

But tucked into the northeast corner of the state, Huntsville is not your ordinary Southern city. As German rocket scientists arrived after World War II, it became home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal and is now a draw for high-tech industry talent from across the country. Joe Ritch helped start the club team in 1979. He wound up going 85-5-2 before handing over the reins to Ross after three years. “It caught on fire in terms of crowds the first year,” said Ritch, now a Huntsville lawyer and University of Alabama trustee. “It got to be the thing to do in late ’70s and early ’80s.”

It’s still popular. The team averaged 1,864 fans to home games this season at a school with an enrollment of less than 7,000. The Chargers moved up to Division 1 in 1999, and started the transition seamlessly with a 21-5-1 season. Now they’re on to the NCAA tournament. “It’s one of those things where you just cannot imagine it going this far,” Ritch said. “Where we started is so far from where it is now, you just don’t see it getting this far.”  But Ross doesn’t want to stop here. The Chargers were the lowest seed at the league tournament, and he figures they will be again next week. “Hopefully, we can get on a roll,” Ross said. “We can win two games and get to the Frozen Four. Those are my plans.”

Ice hockey is played on a hockey rink. During normal play, there are six players per side on the ice at any time, each of whom is on ice skates. There are five players and one goaltender per side. The objective of the game is to score goals by shooting a hard vulcanized rubber disc, the puck, into the opponent’s goal net, which is placed at the opposite end of the rink.

The players may control the puck using a long stick with a blade that is commonly curved at one end. Players may also redirect the puck with any part of their bodies, subject to certain restrictions. Players can angle their feet so the puck can redirect into the net, but there can be no kicking motion. Players may not intentionally bat the puck into the net with their hands.

Hockey is an “offside” game, meaning that forward passes are allowed, unlike in rugby. Before the 1930s hockey was an onside game, meaning that only backward passes were allowed. The period of the onside game was the golden age of stick-handling, which was of prime importance in moving the game forward. With the arrival of offside rules, the forward pass transformed hockey into a truly team sport, where individual heroics diminished in importance relative to team play, which could now be coordinated over the entire surface of the ice as opposed to merely rearward players.

The other five players are typically divided into three forwards and two defencemen. The forward positions consist of a centre and two wingers: a left wing and a right wing. Forwards often play together as units or lines, with the same three forwards always playing together. The defencemen usually stay together as a pair, but may change less frequently than the forwards. A substitution of an entire unit at once is called a line change.

Teams typically employ alternate sets of forward lines and defensive pairings when shorthanded or on a power play. Substitutions are permitted at any time during the course of the game, although during a stoppage of play the home team is permitted the final change. When players are substituted during play, it is called changing on the fly. A new NHL rule added in the 2005-2006 season prevents a team from changing their line after they ice the puck.

The boards surrounding the ice help keep the puck in play (they can also be used as tools to play the puck), and play often proceeds for minutes without interruption. When play is stopped, it is restarted with a faceoff. There are two major rules of play in ice hockey that limit the movement of the puck: offside and icing. Under IIHF rules, each team may carry a maximum of 20 players and two goaltenders on their roster. NHL rules restrict the total number of players per game to 18 plus two goaltenders.

A typical game of ice hockey has two to four officials on the ice, charged with enforcing the rules of the game. There are typically two linesmen who are responsible only for calling offside and icing violations, and one or two referees, who call goals and all other penalties. Linesmen can, however, report to the referee(s) that a penalty more severe than a two-minute minor penalty should be assessed against an offending player. On-ice officials are assisted by off-ice officials who act as goal judges, time keepers, and official scorers.

Officials are selected by the league for which they work. Amateur hockey leagues use guidelines established by national organizing bodies as a basis for choosing their officiating staffs. In North America, the national organizing bodies Hockey Canada and USA Hockey approve officials according to their experience level as well as their ability to pass rules knowledge and skating ability tests. Hockey Canada has officiating levels I through VI. USA Hockey has officiating levels 1 through 4.