"A Decade of Dominance?!" I hear you splutter, indignant with fury at the idea that a lowly hack like myself would point to the Maine Timber as some kind of colossus, stomping the plucky underdogs like your favourite team into the ice year after year, when you remember full well seasons from years past where the woodcutters were as hapless and pathetic as your favourite team's rivals. "Jeffrey, this time you've gone too far!" you continue, spittle flying from your mouth as you hammer your keyboard demanding my immediate resignation, excommunication, disemboweling and mummification. To which I say two things: The first is that all will become clear through the magic of history. The second is that my name isn't Jeffrey, so any hate mail or anthrax parcels with that name on it will probably not come anywhere near me.

But yes, a Decade of Dominance.

Fun fact, within the last decade the Timber have never had a #1 overall pick in the draft. Nor a #2. You have to go back to season 61 before you find a Maine player sitting atop the draft board, when they chose longtime Manhattan Rage forward Jesper Aittokallio, and with the last decade their highest pick was potential Hall of Famer Emil Egli at #6 in season 65. None of what Maine has done within the last ten years has been attained by tanking year on year or scrubbing for the elite players in a draft class, and yet they are one of only two teams to win multiple cups over that time period, which renders their achievements that little bit more impressive.

You are right, hypothetical poison pen letter writer, that Maine have not always been monsters in the regular season - there have been a couple of mediocre years in recent memory where only the overtime loser point has kept their heads above the .500 mark - but the numbers don't lie. Year on year, the Timber have averaged the highest league placement with an average spot of 3.7; those mediocre years were more than balanced out by a span of brutality and the monstrous 51-win, 107-point season 71. They're run close by Nevada, who averaged 4.3 over the same span, but those two teams are a long way apart from the pack and while Maine are arguably still ready to keep that run of form going, Nevada are already being tipped to drop off thanks to the loss of some core players to graduation. (Cue Battleborn fans the continent wide firing up their email providers to send vituperative missives about how I don't know anything and how Caspian Leevi spending 17 minutes a game in the penalty box is good, actually.)

Looking past the regular season lends more credence to the claim, however. Maine, Nevada and Yukon are the only three teams to have made the playoffs in all of the last ten seasons - I've checked and while there's a lot of squads on nine postseason appearances, everybody but those three have had a down season. Or four, in the case of the unfortunate Kelowna Knights, who have won a single playoff series in that span. Do you know who they beat? The answer's at the bottom of the page. What's more is that in those 10 postseason appearances, Maine won at least one series in eight of them, which is a mark that only two other teams can match - Yukon again and the Newfoundland Berzerkers, who do it with nine playoff appearances. Tally topping the league in all of those measures and add the three Four Star Cups to the mix and you should start to see what I'm talking about.

Even on an individual level, Maine has bred for success. This has been written before the release of the 1st All-Star Team for season 74 so there are only nine squads to look at - and yet six of them have at least one member of the Timber squad in there. This even includes the infamous season 70 team where even though four of the six spots were taken up by members of the Cup-winning Nevada Battleborn squad, Maine still found a way in with Peter Tingle's century season. And let's not forget the controversial but justified season 71 Alexis Metzler Award, where the committee ignored the rest of the league in favour of nominating three members of Maine's own Cup-winning team and leaving Trevor Warner skating away the winner.

Suffice it to say, Timber fans have been wildly spoiled. But fear not, haters and ill-wishers, there are clouds on the horizon in the forest, as much as you can actually see the horizon when you're in the forest - the spine of the team that won two Cups in three seasons and barely been out of the upper echelons has gone, off to the big leagues to prove themselves officially not busts, and the spine took a few of the ribs and part of the liver with it as well. Maxwell King II, long a reliable point per game presence, has gone and left the King / Thompson / Guilded trifecta that feasted through the line-matching tactic bereft a winger. Leon Rizzton has gone up - by which I mean down - to deepest darkest Texas, which will be a hell of a climate shift. And worst of all, cue the Elton John soundtrack, as the woodcutters said Goodbye, Nelly Brick Road to goaltender Celly, leaving them looking at Shotty McStopper and praying nominative determinism works as hard as it has in the past. McStopper picked up 14 wins out of 24 starts last season but his .881 save percentage clocked in as fifth-worst in the league and if he can't crank that number up Maine could easily be in for a long and grinding road.

Is it a cliche to say only time will tell? Of course it is, but I'm not a time traveller that any of you can prove and pretending like I can prognosticate is a mug's game. Far better to focus my attentions on history and what's come before - you can hate on me as much as you like but it's in the history books for anybody to see, I'm just reporting it.

(Kelowna's sole playoff series win came against the St. Louis Scarecrows, in six games in season 69. That was the year that everything that needed to click for the Knights actually did - their defense was fantastic the whole season through - but it should have been a warning sign when they took six games to beat the dead last Scarecrows, and was. The Knights' next series was a 4-0 whitewashing against Newfoundland, during which Kelowna were shut out twice and gave the narrative hunters endless fodder for how lack of playoff experience will kill a team every time.)