With Major League Baseball announcing its award winners for the past season, that can mean only one thing – it’s hockey time. With the passage of a mere 102 days since the disputed goal was scored and the Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup, the NHL revved up its 1999-2000 season.

That is the shortest off-season in pro sports. Even the NBA has a month longer for the players and fans to recover. How about this, the NHL teams are already approaching the quarter mark of the season!

The short season matters. The Stars are finding that out as they have played with key player injuries and a Cup hangover. Expansion means teams play an average of three rather than two games per week now. That is a ton for hockey players, especially since there are no layovers in cities for series as in baseball.

The season has also opened with a dramatic shift in power in the NHL. Last year the Eastern Conference teams bested the West teams, 11 games over .500. This year the West is 11 games better against the East.

The primary reason for that is the surge of the Pacific Division. Those teams were 22 games under .500 in the won/loss columns last year. This year they are 15 games over. That is a huge swing, lead by San Jose, Los Angeles and Anaheim.

There are early problems on and off the ice for a number of teams. The Rangers have the highest payroll and can’t get to .500. They have been written off in New York already. The Islanders are building and have very few showing up to watch.

Pittsburgh has the game’s best player in Jaromir Jagr, but not much help and awful goaltending.

Buffalo without Dominik Hasek in net is hurting, and disrupted when he is in goal because of his premature announcement that he’s done after this year. Why he went public with that announcement is a mystery that has not helped Buffalo attend to on-ice business.

Saddest of all is Montreal. The game’s most historic franchise has crashed. A former great player still involved in their organization told me it will take three or four years to regroup. He worries that they are losing that fan base that lived the game at the old Forum.

Montreal went the route of loud music and non-stop bells and whistles whenever the puck wasn’t moving on the ice. It hasn’t worked.

The exciting stories include San Jose, with a fan base that loves the game and its team. Los Angeles is back in the playoff picture with the game’s best defenceman, Rob Blake. “The trades,” says Blake, (for Ziggy Palffy and Bryan Smolinski), “have made the difference. We believe we can win.” The Kings will have to do that without their leading scorer, Luc Robitaille, and center Jozef Stumpel, both out with injuries for six weeks.

Detroit is back in Cup contention with coach Scotty Bowman saying, “We always worry about where the goals are going to come from.” Bowman likes his defense, anchored by Larry Murphy, Nick Lidstrom and Chris Chelios.

“I think the defense is always ahead of the forwards” says Bowman. “But we’re out of the age of the trap. More teams are dropping their up forward back to center ice. It’s the influence of the European game. There will be a lot more center-ice play – more passing.”

That’s good for the game. So is this year’s All-Star game in Toronto. The NHL will retire Wayne Gretzky’s number, just as baseball did for Jackie Robinson. Winter seems warmer already.

NEWS columnist Gary Thorne, an Old Town native, is an ESPN and CBS broadcaster.