It always felt like the bill was gonna come due, even though you kind of thought the Avalanche might be able to stall the creditors a just little longer.

Your No. 1 defenseman is lost to a late-season injury? Your No. 1 goalie too? Then your backup goalie? Three of the last four on the road? A 48-point season followed by a roster makeover that made them the youngest team in the league?

No problem with any of that. The Avs overcame it all to be a playoff team, to become the first team since the Pittsburgh Penguins (in 2006-07) to post a 40-point-or-better improvement from one season to the next, with the fourth-best turnaround of any team in league history.

Think about it: Teams like the Chicago Blackhawks, New York Rangers, Dallas Stars, St. Louis Blues, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers – hell, just about every team in the league – was supposedly better equipped to get a playoff spot than the lowly Avs. So-called big-name hockey media people pretty much all unanimously picked the Avs to finish dead last in not only the Central Division, but the Western Conference and probably the entire league.

I saw something in this team early on, however. It happened in San Jose, at the Rookie Showcase in September. BSN Denver was the only Denver media outlet to cover those games, and even though they only involved a few guys who even played for the team on Sunday, the entire vibe was different around the organization than I’d seen in quite a while. This was an organization truly hungry again, that said all the right things about believing in themselves but actually looked like they meant it this time.

Now look, this isn’t meant to pat myself or BSN Denver on the back here (although you can go ahead and do that, we won’t mind). Did I actually think they’d make the playoffs? No. But right from those days in September in Northern California, I thought this group was finally headed back to better days.

The fact that it all ended in one big splat in front of the Pepsi Center faithful on Sunday? Yeah, it was a bad way to end such a season of otherwise overachievement. Everything about the game seemed off, right down to the weird start time (I don’t recall a home playoff game, or any other game, starting at 5 p.m.) and the fact that the Avs’ forwards seemed to play as if they’d get a $25,000 fine for shooting pucks at the net. Let’s face it, the Avs went out with a whimper, which in itself was a big surprise. They looked like 19 deer caught in the collective headlights right from the opening puck drop. For the second straight home game, the Avs let the Predators come in here and dictate the play in the crucial first period.

The bill, it turned out, finally came due.

Nashville was the better team. They proved it. But I think the Avs exposed them a bit as the wrong choice to win the Stanley Cup. I think Winnipeg is going to beat them in the next round. Their second line is a bit weak and Pekka Rinne just doesn’t strike me as a championship goalie. A little too old, a little too shaky in too many moments.

The Predators were outplayed for very large portions of this six-game series by a team missing a massive piece (Erik Johnson), their second-best defenseman (in my opinion) for three games (Sam Girard), their top goalie (Semyon Varlamov) and backup goalie for the last two games (Jonathan Bernier).

Andrew Hammond was a wonderful story again, with that Game 5 miracle. But, yeah, it’s almost as if he started to look like a guy who had started all of two NHL games on the season, who was a backup in the American Hockey League for much of the season, in this season finale.

Moving forward, I see nothing but good things for this team. They are still the youngest team in the league, with a core of guys who are going to come back even hungrier next season I think. They’re going to get two real stud prospect defensemen on the roster I think. I expect Connor Timmins to make the team out of training camp. Cale Makar won’t start the season with the team, as he’ll head back to UMass-Amherst for a sophomore season. But I expect him to sign when the college season is done, and finish the regular season and, hopefully, the playoffs with the Avs.

https://t.co/46nhUroIkG

— Adrian Dater (@adater) April 23, 2018

The Avs will have a ton of cap room to go out and sign a free agent or two (James Van Rymsdyk, John Carlson, Evander Kane, James Neal, maybe Paul Stastny, anyone?) and to re-sign or extend some guys. They need to get a little bigger up front I think, and need to keep working on that back end. They’ve got to worry some about the goaltending too. Is Semyon Varlamov just too injury-prone now to rely on for another year, on the last year of his contract? If Bernier leaves as a UFA (something that I think will happen), what’s the backup plan, literally and figuratively?

I don’t know how you accomplish this, too, other than to pray to the hockey gods, but: They need to keep their top guys off the injured list at key times. It’s like the first law of the universe now, isn’t it? The Avs must lose a top guy to injury for the season at the worst possible time. Or so it seems.

But this was not some fluky, flash-in-the-pan season. Hockey is a cruel mistress, so nothing can be taken for granted. All those teams that missed the playoffs and watched the underdog Avs play instead are going to work twice as hard this summer to avoid that happening again. The Avs are going to have to work even harder to make it back to hockey in late April again probably.

The bill finally came due on this season. But the message to the 2017-18 Colorado Avalanche, from the hardcore fans and everybody else who watched them from start to finish, has to be:

Don’t worry about it, the tab is forgiven. You paid us in full a long time ago.