Music: {allcanada} Road to retribution begins

The trailers and coming-soons are finished.

Finally, the lights in the theatre are dimming to blackness, the popcorn is choked in butter (or a reasonable facsimile) and the feature presentation set to flicker across the screen.

Get out your 3-D glasses and settle in.

Prep-time, play-time, tinker-time is over.

"Yeah. Definitely. You talk to most of the veterans and it's time to start,'' agreed left-winger Alex Tanguay (notes), after a 1-0 Sunday victory over the Edmonton Oilers that ran the Calgary Flames' exhibition record to a pristine 7-0 in advance of Thursday's 2010-2011 curtain-raiser at Rexall Place. "It's fun to get the pre-season underway. It's fun to have the record we do in pre-season. We did a lot of good things. We built good habits.

"But now we're looking forward to getting into that 'real-game' mode where you have to win and there are no excuses.''

The road to retribution, the path to vindication, starts now.

And undoubtedly among the most pleasant indicators for a return to April's Sweet Sixteen - and yes, yes, we're ONLY talking pre-season here - has been the play of Tanguay, seeking to re-establish his good name after failed and forgettable stints in his backyard in Montreal and the idyllic wilds of Tampa Bay.

Sunday night, as the two arch-nemesis played out the pre-season string, the man entrusted to choreograph the Flames' top line scored the game's lone goal (sheepishly prodding a loose puck past a befuddled Devan Dubynk, while the Oiler netminder scoured the ice in and around his crease, apparently under the belief that loose change had been dropped there) to wind up leading the team in pre-season points, at six, played powerplay and PK, and even took a turn five-on-five on the blueline!

"That,'' protested Tanguay, "wasn't by design.

"We only had five D" - Adam Pardy (notes) having exited in the first period because of an eye injury - "and some of them were pretty tired after killing a penalty. The puck came to me and so I took a shift on defence. I told (Mark Giordano (notes)) to back off, that I wasn't the most swift out there.

"We had our best line out there and they had their third or fourth line. Kipper was screaming at me to get a good gap but I just didn't want to get beat.''

There were other reasons for optimism Sunday. Rene Bourque (notes) and Olli Jokinen (notes) returned from injury. Miikka Kiprusoff (notes) once again gave every indication of starting the season sharp, as he did a year ago. He made 27 saves, arguably the best a trademark left pad reaction dandy off rookie Jordan Eberle from maybe eight feet out in the dying seconds, the Edmonton net empty and the skyscraper-sized Dustin Penner rooting around like a Tuscan dog on a truffle hunt.

After giving the Oiler moppets a comprehensive public tutorial up north 48 hours earlier, in a tense, terse, nasty, blood-spattered affair reminiscent of the good old/bad old days, Sunday's game had a distinct playing-out-the-string, let's-get-on-to-more-serious-matters feel.

As anticipated, being on home ice, Calgary boss Brent Sutter fielded what amounts to the lineup we'll see in Game 1 on Thursday. The Oilers, being on the road, opted to leave the game's latest prodigy, the precocious Taylor Hall, at home. Why risk him? He has his entire professional life to become acquainted with the particular brand of scorn Edmontonians are subjected to at the Pengrowth Saddledome.

They also chose to give the infuriating Zach Stortini the night off, thereby depriving the game of much of its combustibility while ensuring it'd end in under three and a half hours.

Which, considering the nominal stakes involved, might best be described as a mercy benching.

So, the feature presentation is set to begin. But despite the perfect pre-season record, these Flames ain't, on the heels of last year's Ishtar-calibre bomb, exactly opening to rave pre-general release critiques. It isn't exactly a Siskel and Ebert "Two thumbs way up!" reception they're receiving from the reviewers.

Not that it's apt to make Tanguay weep silently into his pillow nights or break out in hives.

"I know the hockey analysts, the hockey experts … call 'em whatever you want … the reporters, they have a job to do,'' he said, shrugging. "And a lot of how they form their opinions is based on what happened last year, on what players did last season compared to years before. And that's okay.

"People aren't expecting as much as in the past? Sure we can use that as motivation. And maybe it's a good thing. Look at Colorado last season. Look at Phoenix. Certainly the fact they were neglected at the start of the year helped them get off to a good start, and a fast start is something you can build a whole season around. Maybe teams mentally relaxed when they played those guys. Maybe they bought into what the media was saying.

"But those teams stepped up to the plate and delivered, no matter what was predicted of them, and that's pretty much our mindset.

"We feel in this dressing room that we have what's needed to make the playoffs, even if not a lot of other people do.

"Now it's up to us to go out and prove it.''