MONTREAL — For weeks now, as the wins have stacked, and as the media contingent surrounding the Carolina Hurricanes has churned and grown, sifting for new narratives and exhuming the old, Rod Brind’Amour has fallen back on a line or three.One of them: “The past is the past.” Could be one game. Could be a few. Could be a series. Could be a season. Doesn’t matter all that much. Move on from the good, just like you move on from the bad. To be unable to do that, Brind’Amour’s logic goes, would be to lose sight of the work. If that’s not a cardinal sin, it’s something close.There’s value in the ethos, and the Hurricanes’ status — one win from the Stanley Cup Final, one win from scaling the hill that comes before the mountain — is proof of its efficacy. Four victories over the Ottawa Senators gave way to four victories over the Philadelphia Flyers, and four victories over the Flyers have given way to three against the Montreal Canadiens. A rust-covered mess against Montreal is mixed in there. On Wednesday, after a 4-0 Hurricanes win that was somehow more lopsided than the score indicated, that lone postseason loss seemed a whole lot farther than five days in the rear-view.It’s on Carolina’s record, though. Last year’s conference-final loss to the Florida Panthers — an ugly result for an overmatched roster that had spent the regular season outkicking its coverage, maximizing its performance and raising expectations to an unreasonable level — is on that ledger, too.For these Hurricanes, that’s a good thing. It’s a reasonable mistake to make about Brind’Amour’s don’t-stop-swimming approach, but it’s a mistake all the same: There’s room for growth, and there’s room for lessons. The tenets of Brind’Amour’s system — the pros and the cons, real and perceived — have been picked apart, reassembled and picked apart again for the better part of a decade. Going 1 for 13 in the conference final, as Brind’Amour’s teams had done before the past six years, tends to have that effect.It’s fair, then, to wonder what has changed for a team that, as a baseline rule, plays every game the same way, and for the coach who demands it. A talent influx is part of the answer; the 2025 team fell short there, out of necessity if not design. Adding electrifying, productive winger Nikolaj Ehlers and rangy, do-everything defenseman K’Andre Miller helped Carolina turn that dial to the right. We’ve all seen it, just like the Canadiens (and Flyers, and Senators) have seen it.What the Hurricanes are more easily copping to, now that they’re closing in on the conference title that’s eluded them, is that while the past is the past, it gave them bits to carry along the way. One team in particular, actually.