The Vancouver Canucks regular season mercifully comes to an end on Wednesday afternoon, hours before the puck drops for Game 3 of the first-round playoff series between the Boston Bruins and Washington Capitals. 

What a remarkable sentence to not only write about but read back again, especially since it's all true. The Canucks are currently residing in an alternate reality, playing out the string on a year that's gone about as bad as it possibly could along every step of the way. 

It started right from the jump in the offseason, when they couldn't afford to retain a number of key contributors, entering the year with a paper-thin roster. Their best player, Elias Pettersson, got hurt in early March and has missed the last 30 games. Essentially the entire team got hit by the worst spread of COV