The Avalanche have gone back to the future, scheming to hoist the Stanley Cup again by doing it the only way this NHL franchise knows how.

Let Super Joe do the heavy lifting.

“We could panic and try to blow everything up and start all over,” Joe Sakic said Thursday, vowing to run it back with a team that flopped in the playoffs, confident there’s hunger to “try to bring home the Stanley Cup.”

How do we know the Avalanche feel the desperation that accompanies a slowly closing championship window?

All you have to do is take one look at the urgency in Sakic’s eyes.

Less than a month from his 57th birthday, Super Joe ain’t a kid anymore.

That wonderful mop of hockey hair sported by the superstar who delivered Colorado its first major professional sports championship way back in 1996 is now thinning on the head of Sakic.

Has it really been 25 years since the Avalanche’s rock-steady captain handed the Cup to Raymond Bourque in a Denver hockey barn that rocked with joy?

After moving to the team’s front office, sitting at the right hand of the late, great Pierre Lacroix to learn tricks of the trade, Sakic served as Colorado’s general manager for nearly a decade that was capped by winning the league championship in 2022.

After a burgundy-and-blue wagon driven by Nathan MacKinnon crashed and burned this spring in the Nevada desert, the state of shock quickly turned to a state of emergency when Executive of the Year candidate Chris MacFarland took the money and ran off to Nashville.

That’s when Avs governor Josh Kroenke ran back the favorite play in the franchise’s book. He asked Super Joe to come to the rescue, nudging Sakic out of his cushy chair as president of hockey operations and get back to the 24/7 grind of general manager for a talented roster that has wasted chance after chance to declare itself an NHL dynasty.

When I asked how much pressure was exerted on Sakic to return as  GM, Kroenke said: “I won’t say I twisted his arm, but I felt very comfortable that could be a default position for us.”

Sakic is back as general manager because the Avs had no other obvious choice.

While MacKinnon will be 31 years old when training camp begins and captain Gabe Landeskog is approaching 34, maybe there’s an even more serious question about how much championship life is left in this graying roster: How much time will the Avs have Super Joe as one of the league’s savviest hockey architects?

When I asked if he was ready to commit to another decade as the team’s general manager, Super Joe looked at me as if I was crazy.

“Ten years?” Sakic said. “I don’t know about 10 years.”

I’d bet this encore with Sakic as GM doesn’t last more than two seasons.

I also strongly believe a core that has made a nasty habit of looking like world-beaters during the regular season but very vulnerable at the first sign of playoff adversity needs to be seriously shaken from its annual spring malaise.

Sakic, however, insists Jared Bednar will remain on the bench. Why?

“He’s the best coach for the group,” Sakic said. “He’s not just the coach. He’s the voice of the organization … The players really believe in him, and I’m going with the players.”

While it would be reasonable to think job one should be fixing the maddening inconsistency of Colorado’s power play, Sakic has a bigger goal in mind.

“Cale is going to finish his career here,” declared Sakic, adding early negotiations with Makar’s agent gives confidence there will be an agreement on an Avalanche-for-life deal at some point this summer.

A contract extension could well double Makar’s current annual salary of $9 million. The infusion of much-needed young talent around Makar, however, will depend in no small part on Sakic’s ability to persuade his superstar defenseman to take a hometown discount.

Although the Avs took 15 long days to lick their wounds after being spanked in the Western Conference finals by the Golden Knights before conducting a post-mortem with the media wretches, this press conference was strikingly different from the recent season-ender by the Nuggets.

Kroenke was front and center, dominating the basketball conversation, suggesting everything was on the table for the Nuggets outside of trading perennial MVP candidate Nikola Jokic.

In a conference room at the Avs’ suburban training rink, Kroenke was mostly a passenger, quietly riding shotgun to Sakic, who calmly drove home the point his hockey team had a great season that ended with one bad week. 

While some worrywarts wring hands and whine the Kroenke family treats its hockey franchise like a redheaded stepchild, I would suggest that is clueless analysis.

“If you have a core of Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar, led by Gabe Landeskog, and the depth we have, I think you better be pushing it and going for Cups,” Kroenke said. “I think going for Cups means spending as much as you can, when you can.”

You can blast Stan and Josh Kroenke a dozen different ways, but you’ve got to respect the father-son ownership team for embracing the motto that has served the Avalanche well for three full decades: 

In Super Joe we trust.

Nobody in Colorado knows better how to hoist the Cup.