Shark vet Marleau finally getting so very close

10:20 PM ET

SAN JOSE, Calif. — It was in that moment of the lowest of the lows that a player who rarely invites the world behind the curtain let his guard down for one brief second.

Fresh off a Game 7 loss that capped a 3-0 series collapse to the rival Los Los Angeles Kings in the opening round of the 2014 playoffs, the face of the San Jose Sharks for almost two decades was asked how this defeat would feed into the perception of his team being perennial playoff underachievers.

“You don’t usually agree with it but then you do something like this, and it’s not easy to take, you know?” Marleau, the longest-serving Shark on the club, said in a moment of unvarnished truth that April night two years ago.

“There’s been a lot of low points, but, yeah, this is definitely one of them, being up 3-0.”

Imagine, it was suggested to him Tuesday, had someone whispered in his ear that very night that just two years later the Sharks would be one win away from the Stanley Cup finals.

“I would have took it from you,” Marleau said, smiling, Tuesday.

Ya think?

Patrick Marleau is playing a different kind of role with the Sharks in these playoffs. Scott Rovak/NHLI/Getty Images

It’s right there for the taking. One more win over the St. Louis Blues on Wednesday (9 p.m. ET) in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals and the Sharks are off to their first-ever Cup finals appearance in their 25-year history. Marleau has been here for 19 of them.

He’s been here for the good — four trips to the conference finals and a ton of playoff games — and the bad, the first-round loss to the No. 8 Anaheim Ducks in 2009, the soul-crushing collapse to the Kings in 2014 and overall just the inability to turn any of those great teams over the past dozen years into a Cup finalist, let alone a Cup champion.

These conference finals are …

continue reading in source espn.go.com