"Sami Salo plans to play next season and wants to play this week.

Next season is encouraging, but this week is the important part.

We are all programmed with survival instincts. We do not touch fire or run with scissors. We seek shelter from the storm. We do not backpack in Somalia or fly Aeroflot or invest emotionally in Justin Bieber. And if we are the Vancouver Canucks, we do not play Sami Salo on the eve of the National Hockey League playoffs unless we are still trying to make them and he goes on to the ice wearing bubble-wrap and a force field.

But Salo is playing, which is more than the Canucks did Saturday in their predictable and forgiveable 4-1 loss to the Edmonton Oilers, who inched within 54 points of Vancouver one game after the Canucks clinched the Presidents' Trophy in the greatest regular season in franchise history.

The Canucks finally looked like a team with nothing to gain and everything to lose. But Salo, having thought last summer that his career might be lost, is still trying to gain strength and timing and rhythmn

as he prepares at age 36 for his best chance to win a Stanley Cup.

"I obviously want to keep playing and prepare myself," Salo said after the game, which preceded a day off Sunday for the Canucks and Tuesday's rematch against the Oilers in Edmonton. "I've only played a quarter of the year. So for me, I'm preparing myself every night the same way. I'm going to try to get the intensity up. . . like you want to be in the playoffs because playoff hockey is still a step up from the regular season."

Saturday was Game 24 of the rest of Salo's career, which was jeopardized by an Achilles tendon rupture during a ball-hockey game in Finland last July. Even before the devastating injury, there was a suspicion this could be Salo's final season in the NHL before he finishes his close to home.

But he said Saturday that he has always planned to stay in the league beyond this season, and his return to the Canuck lineup in February merely reinforced Salo's belief that he has "a few more years for sure left in the tank."

No one on the Canucks is thinking beyond the next few weeks."