So welcome to The Deep.

When the annual hockey odyssey begins, somewhere in the vicinity of the back to school sales, you look around North America and wonder which icy amalgams of sweat and skill and luck are exactly what is necessary to go deep in the playoffs.

Who has what it takes to go deep?

This time, eight months in, what it takes is apparently nothing more or less than what Pennsylvania sees when it looks in a mirror. The Penguins. The Flyers. The oddly sour and yet somehow uniquely delicious chemistry that exists between them.

But here in The Deep, the primary task for both teams, with Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final looming tomorrow night, is to not go off the deep end.

"They've got really skilled forwards," Penguins sniper Marian Hossa was saying after practice yesterday, switching the general topic, at long last, from vitriol to hockey. "Basically, we want to play 5 on 5 against them, because they can really hurt you on the power play.

"We don't want that."

The introduction of actual hockey logic into the roiling Penguins-Flyers discussion always looks perfunctory, as it is almost immediately drowned by this borderline infantile two-teams (and cities)-that-don't-like-each-other sound track.

I'll tell you what the Penguins and Flyers don't like about each other. They don't like the fact that their opponent is fully capable of keeping them out of the Stanley Cup finals.

"We look at it as just another series," Hossa said, "but the fans will be crazy in both cities."

And it's not like they'll have traveled 300 miles to get there. For these teams' faithful and passionate audiences, psychosis is never farther than the next exit. The road is paved with perceived slights and lingering resentments that even through the most dubious accounting will add up to zero when the puck drops inside 500 Mario Lemieux Place.

On Philadelphia's list of priorities, getting under Sidney Crosby's skin ought to have been clipped from the bottom years ago. All Crosby's irritation with the Flyers has done the past three seasons is generate 37 points in 20 games. Rather than figuring how to go all subcutaneous on him, the Flyers would be just as well served pondering an emergency cloning of their own Kimmo Timonen.

Timonen virtually cancelled Alexander Ovechkin's appearance in the first round of these playoffs and did pretty much the same to Montreal's Saku Koivu in the Eastern semis. The challenge for Philadelphia coach John Stevens is to figure out whether Timonen's frantic defensive excellence and relentless energy (he has averaged nearly 25 minutes per game in these playoffs) are to be put on the ice against Crosby's line or Evgeni Malkin's.

I'd be picking Crosby in that one, mostly due to the presence on Sid's line of Hossa, who is developing a postseason habit of getting the enormous goal, game after game. But Penguins defenseman Hal Gill pointed out yesterday that the Penguins' problems are very similar in terms of preparation.

"Every line that they have has at least one big guy and one skill guy," Gill said. "You want to take everything away, but they have a lot of guys who can put the puck in. You can make up your mind that so-and-so's not going to beat you, but that's not the way the game works anymore."

Not this deep in The Deep, anyway.

Rather than an historic scab about to be ripped open with angry contact, maybe the drama that begins tomorrow night should be looked upon in hockey terms with mutual admiration for two teams who've accomplished so much in a short time -- the Flyers becoming only the second team to go from last in the standings to the conference final, the Penguins overcoming serious injuries to their stars to preserve the chance at a Stanley Cup.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sorry.

I don't find anything unmanageably irritating about either team, much less either city, although the Flyers have to know that they should wear orange sweaters at home and white on the road exclusively, because that black sweater is just wrong. How very unoriginal.

Philadelphia's more tangible concerns have to include the suspicion that R.J. Umberger probably isn't going to score eight goals in the next five games, which he did in the past five (a Flyers record for a five-game series), that while the Flyers are as hot as anyone to the East of the Penguins, they only qualified for this tournament 48 hours before it began and that, for all of their recent efficiency, a good argument could be made that the Flyers might not be as good as the New York Rangers, who just got dismissed in five games.

The Penguins aren't completely without issues, but those don't seem to hold the kind of uncertainty that can't be overcome by the way Crosby and Malkin typically play against Philadelphia or by the fact that home ice is no small matter over the next fortnight, as the Penguins have won 13 games in a row at Mellon Arena and haven't lost in regulation there in nearly three months.

Penguins in six.

For the Flyers, The Deep six.