Has Wally Buono lost it? Don't pretend the question hasn't crossed your mind.

Last year he became the winningest coach in Canadian Football League history while guiding the B.C. Lions to their worst record and first losing season since he arrived in Vancouver in 2003.

Buono misjudged his team's talent, created a leadership vacuum by jettisoning too many veterans, allowed the Lions' identity to erode, was heavy-handed with staff and utterly unable to fix the mess when its extent became clear in mid-season.

The Lions' declined sharply for the second straight year, falling to eight wins from 11, down from 14 in 2007.

They made the playoffs only because the bottom three-quarters of the East Division was a joke, but the day of reckoning came in a 56-18 second-round loss to the Montreal Alouettes that was one of the most embarrassing of Buono's career.

In February, the Lions' coach and general manager turned 60.

Has he lost it?

Maybe he has found it because when the Lions open their main training camp Sunday in Kamloops, the guy Buono is most convinced belongs is himself.

"I have a greater sense of excitement and, honestly, I don't know what it came from," Buono says. "I don't know. All I know is the ability to want to coach is there, the excitement of wanting to do this is there. It's strange because it is a kind of a reversal a little bit."

Buono said it has been a long time since he felt as strongly as he does that he is where he needs to be -on the sidelines, coaching his team.

Five years ago, he would not have expected that.

Fresh from the heart surgery that probably saved his life, Buono was reflective and talked openly about the possibility of giving up coaching -if not the game itself -within a couple of years. There were other things he wanted to do, he said. Too many summers had already been spent on football.

At 55, he would not have expected to be coaching at 60.

At this stage, with four Grey Cups, 10 division titles and 235 CFL wins in his account, Buono could be spending weekends at his beachfront place in Parksville. He could be repaying his wife Sande for some of the family time he owes, although the debt is hopeless.

He has three grandchildren, two of them born 10 days apart in April. His son was married in May, just before Buono's youngest daughter got engaged.

It's time for Buono to be a grandfather. And had the Lions gone 13-5 last season and won the Grey Cup, maybe that would be his primary role.

You see, Buono knows the end of his career is coming. But he'll be damned if he allows it to arrive after an eight-win season and 38-point playoff loss that have people asking the question that started this column.

"Everything is going to be different this year," he promises. "The thing that you're hoping to be able to do is go back and re-establish some of the things you didn't have last year. That's why it's easier to come off an 8-10 season than a Grey Cup. It's proving to yourself again that you can build a good organization and a good football team."

In April, owner David Braley signed Buono to a contract extension that could keep him in charge through 2013, although the coach said he'll make a decision annually whether to continue. Would he have signed that deal had the Lions won the Grey Cup?

"Maybe I wouldn't have, right?" he admits. "What drives you a little bit is the disease of winning. I don't believe sports is fun at all. I don't believe what we do is fun at all. But I do believe it's fun to win.

"All the time and effort and emotional commitment that you make is worth it when you win."

To that end, we're already seeing a different Buono.

Uncharacteristically, he went on a CFL shopping spree during the winter to bring in veterans like Davis Sanchez, Keron Williams, Dennis Haley, Jamal Robertson and Derick Armstrong -players who can make an impact in the locker-room and on the field.

After what amounted to an intervention by old friend and player personnel director Roy Shivers, Buono vows to be a more inclusive leader. He will also be a more ruthless one when it comes to players.

"It's not that I'm harder," he says. "I'm opening my eyes to things that maybe at one time prevented me from making a hard decision. I was more patient. I believed in the veteran player and that, when all was said and done, he was going to step up. [Last season] some of them didn't. Some of the guys let us down that way. They let me down; I let them down.

"We've been preaching for six months: 'When you come to camp, come to work. Be physical. Have an attitude. If you don't have that, then I'm not going to give you the benefit of the doubt.'"

Buono neither looks nor sounds old when he says this.

"You know, an Italian father also looks after the grandkids," he says. "When I tell my kids my career is coming to an end, they don't want to hear about that. They want to let their kids experience what they experienced. And I keep telling them that's not going to be possible; their kids can't grow up with me coaching."

Maybe not.

CHICAGO - One day during the Vancouver-Chicago series, Scotty Bowman leaned over a table where a couple of scribes were dining and said, sotto voce: "You know what Toe Blake used to say about the media, don't you?"

We looked up expectantly.

"When you're losing, they can't help you. And when you're winning, you don't need 'em."

And he walked off, with a wink and that ever-present half-smirk. The hero of that evening's game, Chicago's Dustin Byfuglien, was not among the players the Blackhawks — adhering to the letter of the NHL law, going not one inch further than required — produced to be interviewed the following day.

So it was probably not a coincidence, with the Godfather in and out of the Hawks' dressing room these days — perhaps offering the odd bit of counsel to his son Stan, the Chicago GM — that captain Jonathan Toews was conspicuously absent from the available list Saturday.

It didn't necessarily mean anything, except that Toews is the stand-up guy who has been there every day, answering every question, taking on every mini-crisis, all the way through this playoff run. So his absence (no doubt upon advice), while he struggles to find his game against the Flyers, may be a sign of the Hawks' collective sphincter tightening just a bit, as they face the kind of challenge no one has put before them since some early first-round bother with the Nashville Predators.

The Philadelphia Flyers, however, are a whole new level of bother.

Kris Versteeg, the first of the Hawks to appear in the dressing room, groused more than once about "a few shitty bounces, and they end up in our net."

Of course, his right shoulder was the critical body part on the fourth and ultimately decisive Philadelphia goal in Game 4 by winger Ville Leino, whose mis-hit shot struck Versteeg and deflected past Antti Niemi early in the third period of the Flyers' 5-3, series-tying win.

In fact, every one of the goals the Hawks gave up in Game 4 was just a little unlucky — or that's the message they're putting out, though hopefully not swallowing whole.

"Well, in the first period I thought 'generous' would probably be a way of describing all three goals," said Chicago head coach Joel Quenneville. "You can say all four goals against us were uncharacteristic of the type of goals we give up all year. So you look at those isolated incidents and it's a big factor in the way the game is being played and the outcome at the end."

Defenceman Niklas Hjalmarsson's pair of first-period gaffes — having the puck stolen off his stick from behind on Mike Richards's opening goal, then failing to clear a puck that was lying, unmoving, in front of the Chicago net on Matt Carle's 2-0 goal — were bad enough. But the freebie the Hawks donated to Claude Giroux, when he sneaked in behind everybody and stood abandoned at the side of the net awaiting Kimmo Timonen's assist, 51 seconds after the Hawks had scored to climb back within one, was unforgivable.

But making themselves feel better is one thing; believing they are somehow victims of outrageous bad luck is quite another. The fact is, the Hawks were outplayed and outmatched in both games in Philadelphia, and it's starting to look like the ship is listing.

They don't seem to have enough shifts to limit the impact Hall of Fame-bound defenceman Chris Pronger is having on this series, not merely by turning the Hawks' hairy mammoth, Byfuglien, into a quivering mass of jelly but by neutralizing Toews, as well — and just generally irrititating, prodding, pokechecking, half-hooking, half-slashing, half-crosschecking everyone who dares enter his area code.

There's little doubt Pronger is getting away with a variety of misdemeanours. Maybe he has charmed the referees with his rapier-like wit and gap-toothed smile, or maybe he's just doing the crimes with such subtlety, the officials are standing back and admiring his work.

But however they rationalize it, the Hawks have no answer for him, and they need to come up with one in a hurry. That was the idea of splitting up Toews and Patrick Kane for the third period of Friday's game, and it did result in a harder push and more offensive zone time.

But then, the Flyers were playing with the lead — a three-goal lead at the start — and it's dangerous to draw too many conclusions from what happens during prevent-defence time.

Their teammates were quick to defend Kane and Toews, but stats don't lie. The line has a goal (from Kane) and four assists in four games, nothing like the carnage they wreaked upon the Canucks and Sharks.

"It's not only [Kane and Toews] that lost the battle. The whole team lost the battle," said forward Tomas Kopecky. "We all know what we're playing for. I don't think anyone has taken a shift off, but we just have to work even a little harder to get the kind of bounces they got last night."

"They're a part of our team — they're not the whole team." said defenceman Brian Campbell, who has been down this road before, and has no doubt the rolling boulder can be halted, and pushed back in the other direction.

"I know I faced Philly when I played in Buffalo, and we won the first two, they won the next two, and we went on to win in six," he said. "Do they have a bit more momentum than us right now? Sure. And we have home ice advantage. It's a new series."

"If you'd offered us a best-of-three to win the Stanley Cup at the beginning of the year, we'd have taken it," said Andrew Ladd, who returned to the lineup Friday and added some much needed grit.

But if you'd offered them a 2-2 series after Game 2, they probably wouldn't have taken that. It's where they find themselves, though.

Three games or fewer, less than a week, from the end. Uphill all the way