"Look good, feel good, play good" all goes to hell at the end of the season.  Especially with those damn beards.

Starting to look terrible doesn't even begin with playoffs, but man, does it finish with them.  By the time you get through a couple rounds you're making babies cry on sight.

For one, as a hockey player, "sun" is not a part of your daily routine. You're indoors for practice, you're indoors for workouts, and you're indoors for games. You travel, and you stay in hotels. For the most part, you live and play in cold cities. 

Needless to say, one's skin tone isn't the envy of many Clinque models. Every red mark, bump and bruise can be seen in all its glory, seemingly surrounded by negative space like you're a walking version of Google's home page.

And as I wrote in a previous column for Hockey Primetime, keeping weight on isn't the easiest thing to do either. Y'know, since your career is based on exercise.

So come playoffs, you're already skinny and pale. You might have low body fat, but what good does that do you when you look like Silas from The Da Vinci Code after a hunger strike? Half the time you just give up on cutting your hair in the winter and mail in the whole "attractive to the opposite sex" thing.

I mean, take Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. Have you seen these two lately? They did a press conference after Game 5 that inspired a Puck Daddy commenter to say "they look like Wolverine and Sabretooth." Great point, my friend. 

But it's understandable why they've ended up where they are now.  As round one begins, you really start to let it all go – the beard, the hair, the effort in general. 

You're getting thrown into a war zone, a bunker of hard-working dudes whose priority isn't exactly picking up chicks anymore (and neither is yours). It's pure hockey, and it's serious business.

So as the rounds go on, the scruff comes in. You start feeling like a caveman at first, but you get used to it even quicker. It gets to the point where you wouldn't recognize your be-shaven self anymore. This is just what you look like now ... Horrible.

Eventually, you hit that low – that one awful day when the season ends and you have the option of shaving again.

It's a funny feeling, actually. 

Because while a player or two will go straight for the blade in the dressing room, most guys have "grown" oddly attached to their beards. It's the dead-cell-story of how long you've been fighting, and it's weird to just declare a fresh beginning. Plus, you never know when you'll have a valid excuse to test the question "can I grow a beard?" again.

Sometime in the next three days, Wolverine and Sabretooth go back to looking like their usual, near-teenage selves.

While it may be an emotional moment for them, Lord knows the rest of us are ready for that facial chaos and mullet to be GONE.

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