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Six things we thought we knew until the Golden Knights came along

We used to think we had this hockey thing pretty much figured out.

Not completely, of course — it’s not like there was one standard path to winning a Stanley Cup, and anyone who followed it was guaranteed a championship. Hardest trophy to win in all of sports, we used to say. Anything can happen in the NHL, and all that.

But as the salary-cap era rolled into its second decade, the hockey world had compiled a decent batch of conventional wisdom. The road to building a champion was still a difficult one, but there were certain guideposts we could count on along the way.