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ST. PAUL – Your neighborhood garden center should be buzzing this weekend, as folks look to get those flower boxes and hanging baskets ready for the sunny months.

In cabin country, it’s time to open up the lake place and see what messes the winter brought. It is probably still too early to rake and to mow, but checking the gas lines and the spark plugs will have you ready to roll when things green up.

And the Minnesota fishing opener is less than two weeks hence, so getting your license, hitting the bait shop and scouting out a few of those secret spots is a good plan for early May.

Hockey season? Yeah, um, that’s a TV-only event in Minnesota now, perfect for rainy evenings when you want to check in on what’s happening in Raleigh, Las Vegas or north Texas.

In their season finale, the Wild did the most Minnesotan of things to conclude their playoff series with Dallas. Most notably, they continued spring traditions established by J-S Giguere and Jake Allen and Corey Crawford in seasons past and fell victim to an opposing goalie for which they had no answers. This time, in an extra insult to the State of Hockey, it was local boy Jake Oettinger who cut his hockey teeth in the rinks of the south suburbs, spoiling most of the fun, and sending the Stars onto round two.

This spring was supposed to be different. The Wild had flirted with a division title before fading in the regular season’s final week. But they took a 2-1 lead in this series by establishing themselves as the better 5-on-5 team. It seemed that only referees who have clearly been in cahoots with Dallas sports since a chilly 1975 afternoon at Met Stadium could keep Minnesota from experiencing May hockey this time around.

Then the offense dried up. Dallas took a commanding lead in game four and staunched a Wild rally to even the series. Dallas offered the Wild nary a sniff at a goal in game five to take control of the best-of-seven. It all seemed so eerily familiar to the most cynical of Minnesota sports fans. But among the hockey fan base, hope remained.

So late on a rainy Friday evening, here we were again, with the sound and the fury so well done by the Wild production folks. Another sold-out audience was whipped into a pregame frenzy, towels waving, vocal chords straining above the pulsing beat provided by the in-house DJ.

The game started – as they so often do in St. Paul – noisily. The home fans who were perhaps buoyed by another 8:50 p.m. puck drop and the extra hour or so of pub crawling that it afforded, roared for every hit, every shot and every possession of the puck on the positive side of the red line by the team in dark green.

But if the Wild brought the noise, Dallas brought a funk that settled in when the Stars’ first shot of the game fooled Filip Gustavsson. While every game in a playoff matchup is its own entity, and teams preach quickly forgetting both the losses and the wins, the fact that the team scoring first was 5-0 thus far was certainly immediately on the minds of some Minnesota fans.

By the end of 40 minutes, it was 3-0 Dallas and the rink could accurately be called the Xcel Center, as any semblance of energy was mostly gone. Still, a majority of the fans hung around for the final 20 minutes, to see what might have been the last run in red and green for players like Matt Dumba, Marc-Andre Fleury (who played the third period in relief) and who knows who else. The questions regarding what this roster will look like are sure to persist through the draft, free agency and training camp.

Surely by October, when the Wild next shoot a real puck at an opposing goalie, they will find some of those answers. Until then, trade the pucks and sweaters for picnics and sunscreen. April is over, and in keeping with recent tradition, so is Wild hockey.