The 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs open Saturday, and Game 1 between the Boston Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres follows on Sunday evening at KeyBank Center in Buffalo — the ninth playoff meeting between the two franchises and the first since 2010. [1] Boston has won six of the previous eight series. What makes this one different is the team on the other side of the handshake line. The Sabres have not been in the playoffs since the 2010-11 season. Fourteen years is the longest active postseason drought in the history of North American major-league sport, and on April 1 it ended. [2]

The Toronto Maple Leafs, by contrast, missed the playoffs for the first time since 2015-16, ending what had been the NHL's longest active streak. The league's two most storied northeastern-corridor miseries swapped places at the same table in the same spring. [3]

Buffalo is not an Original Six franchise — the city joined the NHL in 1970 — but the region that surrounds Boston and Buffalo is older hockey country than most of the league's expansion map. The Sabres carry a fanbase that has outlasted three rebuilds and two ownership crises. Boston carries its 2011 Cup, its 2013 near-miss, and a working-class self-image its fans call the Spoke-B's.

Hockey's ratings problem is real. Its cultural durability is also real, and the durability lives in exactly this — a first round where a 14-year drought has been broken by the team most likely to lose to Boston. Game 1 is 7:30 p.m. Eastern Sunday on ESPN. The people who care about this series will be watching. [1]

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos