Blackhawks open season Friday morning

Raise your hand if you're going to the Chicago Blackhawks' regular-season opener tomorrow against the Florida Panthers, which is technically a home game.

If anyone actually raised their hand, I'm impressed. I said technically a home game because Friday's opener is the first of two games the Blackhawks and Panthers are playing in Helsinki, Finland. Chicago gets to be a goodwill ambassador as part of the league's globalization effort, as do the Panthers as well as Detroit and St. Louis, who will be playing in Sweden.

Though Bears fever has a firm grip on the Chicago sports scene, and the Cubs and White Sox aren't yet done playing baseball, I've never seen so many people excited about hockey starting. I also don't remember the Blackhawks getting the amount of national attention in my entire lifetime that they've received since last postseason. I did a double take when I looked at my latest issue of ESPN The Magazine and saw Marian Hossa, Cristobal Huet, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews on the cover. Two years ago, the Hawks couldn't crack the cover of the sports section in their hometown newspapers.

But there's obviously a reason the Hawks are getting the attention that they are. Everyone expects them to be really, really good. They're a popular pick to win the Stanley Cup. I'm not going that far, but I think they have a very real chance to go toe to toe with the heavyweights in the Western Conference. The Mag didn't make concrete predictions, but they did use a new system to rate every team based on a number of factors. Chicago received the highest score of any team in the West.

I'd feel a heck of a lot better about the chances of a deep playoff run if Huet and a pair of unprovens (Corey Crawford and Antti Niemi) weren't the goaltenders. Huet sure didn't look like a bona fide No. 1 when the Red Wings were peppering shot after shot past him in the 2009 Western Conference Finals. The rest of the roster might be good enough that he doesn't have to play at an All-Star level, but he has to be decent for its expectations to be realized.