By Bill Ballou, Special to Sharksahl.com

Worcester, Mass. - It took all of seven seconds to find out that the Worcester Sharks first season in the American Hockey League was going to be anything but mundane.

That’s the time rookie center Joe Pavelski needed to create the first scoring chance of the Sharks season and his pro career.

Pavelski took the opening faceoff on opening night in Portland on Oct. 6 and moments later, he was sliding a shot about four inches wide of what was a mostly open net.

Pavelski’s eye-opening play dominated the early weeks of Worcester’s season. He established himself immediately as a leading candidate for the AHL Rookie of the Year Award. But Pavelski was so good that his teammates and Sharks fans saw what the future held.

“You’d like to think (San Jose) will leave him down here for the whole year,” Worcester Coach Roy Sommer said at the time. “But you know what, that ain’t gonna happen.”

Sommer proved to be a prophet. Pavelski was called up to San Jose, presumably never to return, on Nov. 22. Worcester fans will have to be content with a very common AHL lament: “We knew him when.”

The loss of Pavelski wasn’t the end of the season by any means, however. Several Worcester players stepped up to replace Pavelski’s points and presence and the Baby Sharks spent the season vying for a playoff spot in the AHL’s fearsome Atlantic Division.

Something San Jose prospects had done just once during the organization’s five years in Cleveland.

The Sharks first year in Worcester coincided with breakout seasons for a few San Jose prospects.

One was rookie goaltender Thomas Greiss, who got off to a slow start as Sommer tried to juggle an unwieldy three-man rotation that included Greiss, Dimitri Patzold and Nolan Schaefer. Schaefer was eventually loaned to Hershey and then traded by San Jose to Pittsburgh, leaving Greiss and Patzold.

Greiss’ steady, solid play earned him the No. 1 job. When Patzold was recalled to the NHL as Evgeni Nabokov’s backup in March, Greiss responded with Worcester’s best goaltending of the season.

Another breakthrough player was winger Riley Armstrong, whose first two seasons as a pro, both with Cleveland, were forgettable ones.

His third year was different, though. Armstrong went from being a fourth liner to being a key component in the Worcester offense. He brought energy to the ice with each shift and began finding the net, with only a late-season concussion preventing him from having 20 goals by St. Patrick’s Day.

Second-year forward Tom Cavanagh made major strides, too, during his first year in Worcester. Cavanagh’s point production just about doubled and he saw lots of ice time as the team’s top penalty killer. Mike Iggulden, playing center on Worcester’s top line once Pavelski left, scored 22 goals as a rookie last year and topped that by March 1 this season.

Defensively, Worcester uncovered a sleeper in fourth-year pro Brennan Evans. The Baby Sharks were Evans’ third AHL team in three seasons. From the time early in the season when he began skating a regular shift right through the stretch run, Evans was a reliable, durable and effective defenseman. Into the year’s final weeks, he led the team in penalty minutes and plus-minus, a pretty unique combination.

Veteran left wing Mathieu Darche, who came back from a year in Europe to play for Worcester, scored 19 goals in the season’s first 20 games. Still, he was the team’s most dangerous offensive threat as a point-a-game player and a 30-goal man.

That label could’ve gone to Graham Mink, another veteran, had he not missed the first quarter of the season with a groin injury. Once he returned, Mink hit the 20-goal mark in a little more than 40 games. He also set a franchise record with a four-assist game along the way.

Veteran defenseman Scott Ferguson was the oldest player (34) on the roster and the only one to play in every game heading into the season’s final weeks.

Off the ice, the move from Cleveland to Worcester seemed to work as well as it did on the ice. The Sharks were like virtually every other AHL team and didn’t see consistently large crowds until after Christmas. Attendance peaked on the first weekend in March when Worcester’s schedule included back-to-back-to-back home games — three in three — and the Sharks drew 19,050 combined for the weekend.

As the regular season was ending, Worcester was approaching the 4,500 mark in average attendance, well ahead of what the franchise drew during the Cleveland years.

“In Cleveland,” Sommer said, “they could’ve cared less if we were there or not there. There was a small core of fans who followed us, but it was miniscule compared to the crowds here. It was really tough most nights going out there in front of 500, maybe 1,500 fans.

“And it (small crowds) makes a big difference to play in,” Sommer added. “I’d talk to coaches on other teams and they’d tell me how they’d come into our building and there was just nothing there for atmosphere. It was hard for them to get up for the games, too.”

Defenseman Garrett Stafford spent the first three years of his professional career in Cleveland and remembers the sea of empty seats only too well.

“It’s always fun to play in front of big crowds,” he said. “The energy in the building is completely different when it’s a packed house. And it’s always nice to feel accepted by your fans.”

The DCU Center, the home of the Worcester Sharks, has a curtain that creates a more intimate atmosphere by blocking off about 5,000 seats in the upper levels. The curtain can be deployed in a couple of different arrangements, so sellout crowds can vary slightly in raw numbers.

The building sold out at 7,230 for the home opener, then twice more for games against arch-rival Providence. On March 2, the DCU Center played hosts to the opening ceremonies for the Special Winter Olympics before a Sharks game. That game drew a franchise-record 7,352.

Beyond the issue of great fan support in Worcester, the move from Cleveland also worked from a player development standpoint. The baby Sharks played six games all season that required hotel stays. Otherwise, every road game was an easy and short round trip bus ride.

“That’s unbelievably good for a player, especially in the minors,” Stafford said. “In Cleveland, we’d be on a bus for four or five hours, sometimes the day of the game. I can’t begin to explain how nice this has been.”

“The travel has been huge,” Sommer said. “Even with away games, our guys can be home and in their beds by 11:30. In Cleveland, the day after a road game was useless. We’d have a late practice, but everybody was so tired. It wasn’t worth being there. Nobody was good for anything.”

The Sharks move from Cleveland to Worcester has certainly been good, as well, for the hockey fans of Central Massachusetts, who’ve seen potential young stars like Pavelski and Greiss mix with talented veterans like Mink and Darche.

And to think it all started to come together just seven seconds after the opening faceoff.

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Bill Ballou covers the Worcester Sharks for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.