No matter what anyone says, Saturday it isn’t just another game. When the Canucks come to town, it should be the most exciting regular-season game of the season. 

When you look at this Bruins team and see that they win (pretty much) every night, have zero holes and can blow out the opposition whenever they feel like it, things can tend to become rather routine.

A 6-1 win over the Devils? Sure. A 9-0 blowout against the Flames? Just another day at the office for the Bruins. A goaltender allowing just one goal over his last four starts? It’s nothing we didn’t see last year with the other guy. 

That’s why when the Bruins and Canucks say that Saturday’s matchup is just another game, they’re wrong. 

The Bruins are playing exciting -- though certainly not suspensful -- hockey, but Saturday should take it to another level. It shouldn’t be just another blowout (though it could be, as the B’s won big in all three games at the Garden during the Stanley Cup finals), but it will be as emotional a regular-season games as you could ever see. 

Think back to the moments after the Bruins won the Cup in a heated series against the biting, diving and blabbering Canucks.

“They thought they were going to roll over us,” Brad Marchand said on the ice at Rogers Arena. “We hated them so much.”

That hatred was mutual between the two teams, and it isn’t hatred that just goes away.

Think what the Bruins are doing right now makes for must-see TV? Bring over the Canucks and all the emotion that should carry over from the Cup finals. Bring over Alexandre Burrows, who could be itching to pull another Walking Dead on Patrice Bergeron. Bring Kevin Bieksa, who was more focused on making fun of Andrew Ference’s “The Jacket” than he was on having a positive rating (he finished the series at minus-4). Bring the Sedin twins, who have been called soft ever since the Bruins pushed them around in June. And then there’s Roberto Luongo, who let his mouth get the best of him and has to be itching to at least take one game from the Bruins in Boston. 

The Canucks have to be fired up. After having a chance to win the Cup in six games and letting it slip away, how could they not be? 

"It's another game to us,” Kevin Bieksa told Vancouver reporters this week. “It’s obviously the team we lost the Stanley Cup to, but it's still another two points that we need. I don't think we need to put a whole lot more into that game other than we need the win."

What kind of crap is that? You mean to say Bieksa, he of the worst dive not committed by P.K. Subban last postseason, and the regrettable remarks about The Jacket, isn’t still angry that the Bruins won that series? These players can’t just admit that the hate the two teams developed for one another in the seven-game series is probably strong enough to carry over?

Every team wants to beat the defending Stanley Cup champions, but it’s hard to imagine any team wanting to beat them more than the Canucks. If they come out hard against the B’s, they could give them a run for their money. Vancouver is fourth in the league in goals per game and are seventh in goals against while also boasting the best power play in the league. Their penalty kill is sixth.

The Bruins don’t exactly get many tests. The last test they got was when they hosted the Panthers on Dec. 23, and it was only because Florida was one of the few squads to hand them a loss since November. The Bruins handled that “test” with an 8-0 win. Dallas wasn’t considered a test, but it woke the Bruins up. Since then, they’ve outscored their opponents, 15-1. 

Credit the B’s for remaining focused this week with Saturday’s game looming, because it should be admittedly a big game on their schedule. They just don’t seem to want to admit it. 

“The Stanley Cup playoff finals were last year, not this year. We won and it’s not like we have to prove anything,” Claude Julien said. “We just have to go out and play hard like we do every night and try and win that game. I don’t think the outcome of Saturday is going to change anything in our life.”

Right. Saturday won’t change anything in the Bruins’ lives, but it was against the Canucks that all of their lives changed. That’s going to evoke some kind of emotion, just like seeing the Bruins for the first time since losing the Cup will bring something out in the Canucks. Nathan Horton, who was knocked out of series by a blindside hit from Aaron Rome in Game 3, also claims it’s just another game, but no matter who says it, it’s hard to believe.

Leave it to a guy who wasn’t on the team last season to accurately describe what to expect Saturday. 

“Like a playoff game probably,” Benoit Pouliot said. “They’re going to be hungry, that’s for sure, and I watched the playoffs last year and it was pretty intense. They’re coming in here at 1:00 and we’ll be ready.”

If the two teams want to downplay it and act like Saturday doesn’t mean something to them, that’s fine. You’re just a sucker if you believe that.