Every team talks about a home-ice advantage. Every team talks about being tight, close, and playing for each other

The Abbotsford Canucks have done all of that.

Their reward is a chance to earn the opportunity to skate the Calder Cup around their Abbotsford Centre ice. One more win would do that for the Canucks, who will host the Charlotte Checkers in Game 5 of the Calder Cup Finals tonight.

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Just another team making its way through the Pacific Division for the first half of the regular season, the Canucks had meandered their way through the first three months of the regular season for new head coach Manny Malhotra.

After getting blown out on the road by the Laval Rocket, 6-2, on Jan. 4, they sat a mediocre seventh in the Pacific Division with a 14-15-1-1 mark. Tied with the Bakersfield Condors at 30 points (and yielding three games in hand), the Canucks barely had their heads above the divisional playoff line. The Tucson Roadrunners had started to pull away, holding down sixth place with a five-point lead on the Canucks.

First place? The Calgary Wranglers had a grip on that as well as a 17-point gap with the Canucks. Even the second-place Ontario Reign sat nine points up on Abbotsford.

Coming back home following that loss to Laval that finished a four-game road trip, the Canucks had a six-day break in their schedule.

Clearly they used that time well. Starting a six-game homestand Jan. 10, they swept the Henderson Silver Knights in back-to-back games. Then came two-game sweeps of Ontario and the San Jose Barracuda on home ice before the Canucks went south to Tucson and took a pair of games from the Roadrunners.

Three weeks after that rout in Laval, the Canucks owned an eight-game winning streak.

Defenseman Christian Wolanin saw that turnaround unfold and attributes it to the Abbotsford roster starting to find some midseason stability.

“For as much as, you know, It might be important to have good players,” Wolanin said, “chemistry is equally as important, and repetition is equally as important. The systems that Manny was teaching, and the way that we play now, and the way we're structured now, it's a repeatable and consistent recipe versus kind of the beginning of the year, I thought that there was a lot of fluctuation, a lot of different moving parts in our line-up.”

They barely slowed down again, never losing more than two games in a row from that point onward. Down the stretch they ripped off a 13-game winning streak and finished the regular season on a 16-1-0-1 tear that ultimately earned them a second-place finish in the Pacific Division as well as a chance for first place in the Western Conference with the Colorado Eagles that came down to the final week of the regular season. In all, they went 30-9-1-1 after that loss to the Rocket back in January.

Armed with a group of reinforcements sent back by the Vancouver Canucks, Abbotsford had emerged as a legitimate Calder Cup contender.

Then it nearly all fell apart on them. Matched up with Tucson in a best-of-three first-round series at home, the Canucks came through with

a 4-3 victory. But then Tucson turned to Jaxson Stauber in place of Matthew Villalta and took Game 2 with a 4-1 victory. Two games into their postseason, the Canucks already faced playoff elimination.

Those short series can be perilous for even top clubs. Just ask the Reign, who went out in a two-game sweep to San Jose. Or the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, who fell to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms in first-round play for the second year in a row. But the Canucks survived. They hammered Tucson, 5-0, in the deciding third game as Artūrs Šilovs picked up the first of his five playoff shutouts so far.

The Pacific Division Semifinals, a best-of-five series, got dicey as well. After going on the road and defeating the Coachella Valley Firebirds in Game 1, three first-period goals from the Firebirds chased Šilovs in Game 2 in an eventual loss. But the Canucks regrouped back at home, took the next two games from the Firebirds, and had themselves a match-up with Colorado in the Pacific Division Finals. Each team won once on the road in the first four games of the best-of-five series, again leaving the Canucks facing elimination. Once again, though, they came through with a 5-0 victory, this one on the road, to oust the Eagles.

It was off to the Western Conference Finals and the Texas Stars, a series that opened with a pair of Canucks wins at home. But the Stars took two of the next three games in Texas and sent the series back to Abbotsford, where the Canucks closed it out with a 4-2 win after falling behind early.

Pitted against Charlotte in the Calder Cup Finals, the first time for the Vancouver organization since 2015, the Canucks had to go on the road to Bojangles Coliseum and the hot, humid Charlotte weather. They pulled out a Game 1 victory in double-overtime before losing Game 2 in overtime. Thanks to Šilovs, the Canucks came through with a split despite allowing a combined 96 shots in the opening two games. They went 1-1 with the Checkers through 40 minutes in Game 3 back at home before blowing out the visitors, 6-1. They held Game 4 firmly in control most of the way, though the Checkers rallied late before Abbotsford finished off a 3-2 win.

Everything that Malhotra has asked his players to do as this series has moved along, they have done. Clean up penalty trouble? Done. Better starts? Check. Breaking pucks out of the zone more efficiently? No problem, coach. Against a Charlotte team that had overwhelmed opponents with speed and relentlessly hunting the puck, the Canucks have instead inflicted that constant pressure on the Checkers in these back-to-back home wins. They have repeatedly won neutral-zone puck battles and exploited Charlotte for a series of odd-man rushes.

With Vancouver having missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs altogether and then having seen head coach Rick Tocchet depart for a job with the Philadelphia Flyers. There is still more roster uncertainty following a season that had already been a challenging one for Vancouver fans. They needed some happiness from their AHL affiliate an hour to the east, and that wish has come true. Šilovs, a playoff hero last year with Vancouver, perhaps can be a solution for Vancouver. First-round pick Jonathan Lekkerimäki had missed games on this Abbotsford run, but he returned to action this week and supplied a pair of goals in Game 4. Arshdeep Bains looks excellent as does Linus Karlsson, the leading scorer in the Calder Cup Playoffs, and a long list of Abbotsford prospects.

All in all, this is a team that has gone 15-7 in the Calder Cup Playoffs. Combine that with the 30-9-1-1 post-Jan. 4 mark, and the Canucks are a robust 45-16-1-1 (.730).

With the Vancouver and Abbotsford fan bases largely one and the same, the Lower Mainland has rewarded this AHL club with robust fan support for much of the spring. After averaging 4,152 at home in the regular season, Abbotsford tickets have been hard to come by as the team has played in front of a 6,024 average in the postseason. They have been rewarded generously, as well, with the team winning 10 of its 12 home playoff dates.

Wolanin won the NCAA national championship as a freshman with North Dakota in 2016. His father, Craig, won the Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche in 1996.

“At least my father,” Wolanin said, “he would do anything to go through the highs and lows of a hockey season. He would do anything to feel the pressure of a Game 6 or feel the pressure of an overtime. Like, that's the stuff that you're going to miss. And a lot of guys often talk about how they remember the journey more than they remember the actual result.

“I was lucky enough to be a part of that national championship team at North Dakota, but I was a freshman. So, I really didn't understand how hard it was to actually do. You know, I was like, ‘Oh, we'll do this every year. Like, it's easy.’

Wolanin is 30 years old now and has played 86 NHL games while also establishing himself as a top-end leader at the AHL level. Maybe there are more playoff runs in his future. But maybe not. Forward Sammy Blais is 29. Jujhar Khaira, a late-season addition from the Syracuse Crunch, is 30. At 31 years old, Phil Di Giuseppe is the oldest player on the Abbotsford roster.

Nothing comes guaranteed in hockey, especially at the always-changing AHL level.

“After being this deep into my pro career,” Wolanin continued, “and this being the first true run that I've been able to have, you realize that not every team is built for stuff like this, and you realize that not every team has the grind or has the resilience or has the group in that locker room to go for it. And when you do get it, you don't want to take it for granted, and you don't want to think that, ‘Oh, it'll happen again next year.’

“You know, you have to be in the moment, and you have to take advantage of every late night or every late card game or all the little moments that make this journey so fun. You realize that it doesn't come often. So again, I think a lot of our older guys have felt that way, and I think that's kind of bleeding into our group that this doesn't just happen.”

Tonight they have a chance to give their Abbotsford fans one last home game and perhaps a Calder Cup championship.

“It's so much fun for the guys just playing in front of this crowd,” Malhotra said following Game 4. “The building was electric again, and they definitely feed off of that, so it's very special for our guys to play in front of the fans, and then we get a big boost out of it.”

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