The patience of Flyers fans, the ramifications of Saquon Barkley’s retirement talk, and other thoughts

First and final thoughts …

If you’re not watching the Stanley Cup Final, you can’t be my friend.

Severe, I know. But a man has to have standards, and everything about the first four games of the series — two wins for the Florida Panthers, two wins for the Edmonton Oilers, three overtimes, crazy comebacks, brawls and battles and drama for days — has been the stuff that makes playoff hockey better than just about anything else in sports.

No matter the outcome, it will be a hell of a story. Either the Panthers repeat as champs and establish themselves as a mini-dynasty, or the Oilers become the first Canadian franchise to win the Cup in 32 years and Connor McDavid gets his validation as one of the all-time-ALL-TIME greats.

» READ MORE: The Flyers’ journey back to relevance got harder after the NHL draft lottery

If you’re a Flyers fan, of course, the best you can do at the moment is enjoy the series from a distance and hope that your team will soon be good enough to return to the playoffs, let alone compete for a Stanley Cup. But soon is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it takes only a quick glance at the Panthers’ and Oilers’ rosters to understand how much work — and how long it might take for the Flyers to reach the level of a club like Florida or Edmonton.

Take the Panthers first. Six of their top seven forwards and both of their top two defensemen — Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Bennett, Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart, Carter Verhaeghe, Evan Rodrigues, Aaron Ekblad, and Gustav Forsling — are between the ages of 27 and 31.

Now look at the Oilers. They’re top-heavier, with two of the five best players in the NHL. But the team’s supporting cast is clustered in the same generation, too. McDavid is 28. Leon Draisaitl is 29. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is 32. Jake Walman is 29. Darnell Nurse is 30. Evan Bouchard, at 25, is the relative outlier, and even he has been around a while; he’s in his fourth full NHL season.

See where we’re going here, vis-à-vis the Flyers? Travis Konecny is 28, in his prime, and Owen Tippett is 26. But Tyson Foerster and Bobby Brink are 23. Matvei Michkov is 20. And the prospects who already are in the system or haven’t been drafted or signed yet are teenagers or in their early 20s.

Regardless of the players who end up part of the Flyers’ core — and there’s no way yet to know who all those players will be — it’s likely going to take years for them to mature, grow, and gain the experience necessary to be an elite team. You can be optimistic about the Flyers’ future, but you still have to be very, very patient.

» READ MORE: T.J. McConnell is what The Process was supposed to be. He’s just doing it for the Pacers, not the Sixers.

Saquon Barkley caused a bit of a stir recently by saying during a podcast interview that, when he retires from football, he might be “one of those guys that it would be out of nowhere,” that the decision likely would be a total surprise to everyone except him.

He walked those comments back some Tuesday during the Eagles’ latest and last round of organized team activities: “I don’t have a set date or how many years I want to play. I would love to play this game as long as God lets me and my body lets me.”

But the question of when Barkley, who is 28, or any other high-profile player might retire raises another question: In the wake of the House settlement, many college football players presumably can earn millions of dollars before they ever enter the NFL. So, given that they will have those healthy financial head starts, will we see more of them retiring at younger ages for the sake of preserving and protecting their long-term health?

A couple of last-minute Father’s Day gift suggestions: Baddest Man by Mark Kriegel and The American Game by S.L. Price.

Kriegel, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and former sports columnist at the New York Daily News, and Price, a longtime longformer at Sports Illustrated, are two of the finest sportswriters (or any sort of writers) around, and these books put their powers on full display.

At their most basic, Baddest Man is a biography of Mike Tyson, and The American Game is a history of lacrosse in the United States. But there’s much more to these books than those simple descriptions. So much more. Buy them. Read them.

I’m not saying the New York Knicks are getting desperate in their search for Tom Thibodeau’s replacement, but a source tells me they’ve asked for permission to interview Eddie Jordan, Jim O’Brien, and every boys’ basketball coach in the Central League.

» READ MORE: Forget the Phillies. The best Philly baseball story is in the ’burbs.