San Jose: It's crunch time

By Jenna Hudson

Good news Bay Area sports fans. The suffering is over. You don't have to move to another state just to make SportsCenter worth watching again. Thanks to a little hockey team from San Jose, there's a team worth cheering for.

That's right, folks. The San Jose Sharks are quite literally chomping their way through the NHL playoffs. But then something happened. I started picking up the Mercury News every day turning to the sports section and reading "Sharks Win!" Headline after headline until- "Sharks make the playoffs."

This Sunday at 1 p.m., the HP Pavilion will become ground zero of the hockey world as the Sharks battle the Flames.

Time to turn off the cynicism and turn on ESPN. And for good reason. With a stellar goalie in Evgeni Nabokov, a nearly unstoppable top line, and a defense that manages to stifle many difficult opponents, the Sharks don't look like they're stopping any time soon.

Indeed the Sharks blew by the disappointment of two consecutive sudden-death overtime losses to demolish the Av's in Colorado on Tuesday.

The sharks move on to face the sixth-seeded Calgary flames, with whom they split the season series two games a piece (each team winning twice at home) in control of home-ice advantage

But what's perhaps even more surprising than the Sharks' incredible playoff run, are the hardcore fans heading to the Shark Tank in droves.

Sharks tickets are the hottest new item to hit the ticket counters. Bottom line: you can't get them. And believe me I've tried.

I even hit the Ebay site where two tickets can be bought for the grand price of $400 â€" and those are tickets in the upper decks!

I'm stuck watching games on my couch. But that's just fine. Right down the street the Sharks are making waves on the ice. And as for whether they sink or swim? Stay tuned.

û Contact Jenna Hudson at (408) 554-4852 or jhudson@scu.edu.