You can revamp your lineup. Add a bunch of new faces to help with the offence. Shuffle up the defence. Add the enthusiasm of youth. Change the bosses behind the bench. Have them work out together, go through an entire preseason geared towards finding a new cohesion, prepare them for a new season with dreams you damn well expect to reach this time.

And it turns out, it might take more than one game to get there. (But others don’t seem to always have this problem.)

Was this a game from the 2018-19 season, or 2017-18? It had every single hallmark that elevated the Flames to new and impressive levels of frustration that we got so used to over the past year: out-corsi the other team, outshoot the other team, fail to outscore the other team. Don’t score on a single powerplay, and maybe even spend more time trying to get back into the offensive zone (with a bump back pass, can’t forget those!) than conducting any play of note. Get scored on and then get so dismayed for some reason another goal is immediately given up, effectively ending the game no matter how much time is left. Hang your goalie out to dry four (!) times because you couldn’t stop giving up those juicy breakaways or letting opposing players just hang out beside the net without a soul covering them.

It was a deja vu in all the worst ways. Every bad habit the Flames developed over the past year, they allowed to stay in their game. You would have hoped that the new coach would have gotten all of that out of their system by now; then, if you’re particularly pessimistic, you remember the 2017-18 Flames and 2017-18 Hurricanes – coached by the same Bill Peters – were both high-corsi teams that couldn’t finish much better than .500.

The revamped forward group gave the team options, though none of them really came together quite yet, but at least every single player present has scoring talent – you just have to hope they actually reach those levels. And that the defence wakes up, because there were quite a number of yikes moments from that group, the most memorable of which resulted in way too many goals against.

It was only one game. The entire season has not been lost.

Mikael Backlund? He still has it. Matthew Tkachuk? Him, too. Austin Czarnik? Maybe he should stick on that line; the early returns are smiling on him.

They didn’t get shut out, and at times looked like they might have a go at tying the game. Maybe they could have, if there was a fourth period.

Czarnik, Noah Hanifin, and James Neal all picked up their first points as Flames.

Every single forward had a shot on net; the only defencemen who didn’t were Travis Hamonic and Michael Stone. They were, for the most part, very much trying to score.

Dillon Dube and Juuso Valimaki made their NHL debuts. That will always be exciting.

The Canucks are projected to be bottom feeders this season. Losing to them and starting off the year with a -3 goal differential is a horrible look.

Stone and Hamonic did not exactly have what one would call banner nights, particularly at a few key moments in which the Canucks scored and they were doing… well, I couldn’t tell you what.

They had seven chances on the powerplay. Seven. And they couldn’t score. Seven. It didn’t even look different from last year; plus, without Dougie Hamilton, they’ve lost a lethal option at the point. (Why does TJ Brodie ever wind up like he’s going to shoot? We all know he’s not going to shoot. Everyone on the ice knows he’s not going to shoot.)

How badly does the powerplay kill everything? The Canucks’ first goal was scored seconds after a failed Flames powerplay. So was their fourth one, which really ended any hope for the game: the Flames, facing a two-goal deficit, got a powerplay right after Tkachuk scored. Instead of cutting it away to a one-goal deficit with the man advantage, they allowed it to go back to three almost immediately after.

But if you want to talk momentum killers, you have to talk the start of the third period. Two goals in 28 seconds. Give up one goal, then immediately give up another one because the game is hopeless, so might as well make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right? It’s that, or nobody was paying attention. Or maybe both. It’d certainly be on brand.

68.29% – The Flames’ 5v5 corsi over the course of the night. (If you include all situations, it drops to 68.22%. Pretty mild drop, but then you remember the Flames had seven powerplays to the Canucks’ one, so how the hell did it actually fall?)

0 for 7 – Because we really can’t stop harping on just how terrible the powerplay was. They deserve to have their noses rubbed in it until they fix this mess. Through 2017-18, I kept track of games in which you could argue the powerplay singlehandedly cost them; we’re one game into this season and we’ve already got a game on the list.

8+ minutes – The amount of powerplay time Johnny Gaudreau (8:31), Monahan (8:13) and Tkachuk (8:13) got. We know these are talented offensive players; how can they do so little with all of that time? Not far behind them were Elias Lindholm (7:48), Mark Giordano (7:27), Brodie (6:25), Derek Ryan (6:04), Backlund (5:39), Neal (5:21), and Czarnik (5:18).

20+ minutes – The amount of total ice time Giordano (25:46), Gaudreau (23:34), Monahan (23:14), Brodie (23:13), Tkachuk (22:19), and Lindholm (20:21) got. Hanifin and Backlund just missed the cut at 19:36 and 19:13 played, respectively.

10:19 and 9:07 – The amount of ice time Valimaki and Dube had in their NHL debuts, respectively. That’s more than Mark Jankowski (8:52) and Sam Bennett (8:47), in case you were wondering which line was the fourth line.

52 seconds – The amount of penalty kill time Dube got in his debut, the second most amount for a forward, behind Jankowski (1:00). They grow up so fast.

.818% – Mike Smith’s save percentage. We can point fingers at the defence (and we should), but we’re off to a very early start to the narrative that the Flames “ran into a hot goalie”. And the reason they can’t have the hot goalie is…? The Canucks gave up breakaways, too.

Every team is going to have bad games this season. Every single one. The Flames just happened to have it happen to them right out of the gate. There’s still tons of time for the ship to right itself and the team to finish top three in the division or whatever – but that’s also two points they realistically should’ve had gone due to a lot of nonsense we saw play out over the past year.

The sooner the Flames get it together, the sooner they can earn people’s trust that this’ll be different from last year. That’s something they need to get on, because this wasn’t inspiring.