The 65-win Boston Bruins are poised to face off against a Florida Panthers team that barely scraped into the final wild card spot. 

There's a sentence I didn't expect to write back in September.

The Last Dance went better than anybody in Boston could possibly have expected, with the best regular season of the cap era and the most wins in NHL history. The combination of the team's typically excellent defence with a bolstered offence and Vezina calibre goaltending proved to be a buzzsaw that nobody could stop for months. But as the window threatens to slam shut, this could be the final chance for the Patrice Bergeron-led Bruins to collect another Cup – and they know it, having emptied the cupboard to add Dmitri Orlov and Tyler Bertuzzi at the trade deadline.

Plenty is at stake for the Panthers