DALLAS — The Stars are toast.

Top-line winger Jason Robertson is out week to week. No. 1 defenseman Miro Heiskanen hasn’t played since late January. They’ve lost seven straight games, including a dismal 5-1 faceplant against the lowly Nashville Predators in Wednesday’s season finale. And they’re facing Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and the speedy, scary Colorado Avalanche in Round 1, thanks to the NHL’s occasionally cruel divisional playoff structure.

Colorado’s a fairly heavy favorite in the series at -160, per BetMGM. Two-thirds of The Athletic’s hockey staff (look out for predictions soon) picked the Avalanche, too. To hear most of the hockey world (and a vocal contingent of Stars fans) tell it, Dallas — perennial favorites to win it all in recent years, and the Stanley Cup choice of 51.7 percent of The Athletic staffers just one month ago — is done.

But is it?

Are we possibly overreacting to seven meaningless games at the end of the regular season, when the Stars were already locked into second place in the Central Division? Are we possibly overrating an Avalanche team with a goaltender, Mackenzie Blackwood, who’s been in the league for seven seasons without ever playing in a postseason game? Are we forgetting how deep the Stars’ forward group is, even without Robertson, a group that on Friday had Mikko Rantanen (101 points in 81 playoff games in his days with the Avs), 33-goal scorer Wyatt Johnston and former league MVP Jamie Benn on the third line? Are we looking past the fact that Dallas finished ahead of the Avalanche in the Central despite losing Tyler Seguin for 62 games and Heiskanen for 32? Are we overlooking Jake Oettinger?

Yes, the Avalanche are fast. Yes, the Avalanche are good. And yes, the Avalanche got deeper at the trade deadline, finally filling the hole at second-line center with Brock Nelson, adding Jack Drury to the bottom six and giving Makar and Devon Toews some support on the back end with Ryan Lindgren.

But these are still the Dallas Stars. That still means something, doesn’t it?

“The message to our team is, ‘Who are we?’” coach Pete DeBoer said on Friday. “Are we the team that limped into the playoffs the last 7-8 games, or are we the team (that), for 75 games, faced adversity, injuries to key guys for long stretches and found a way to grind out wins and have the record we have? I know the answer, but we’ve got to show the hockey world which team we are.”

If there’s panic in the streets of Dallas over the Stars’ fate, it hasn’t reached the locker room. After an hour on the ice in suburban Frisco on Friday morning, the Stars were loose and confident. You heard a lot of “next-man-ups” about the Robertson injury. You saw a lot of shrugs about losing a bunch of meaningless games down the stretch. You sensed a calmness that only comes with experience.

“(In) 2022 with the Avs, we lost six out of our last seven, and we won the Cup,” Rantanen said. “It’s obviously not ideal, we want to finish strong. I’m not saying every year it happens where you finish 1-6 or so (and) you win the Cup. But that’s what we had then. It’s a different game (in the postseason). When the standings are set, you play hard, you want to get ready, but it’s not the same as the playoffs. So I’m not worried about the team at all. We have high confidence here and no doubt in our mind at all.”

Fans don’t like to hear this, but every championship-caliber team goes through an evolution, a process of realizing the regular season is utterly meaningless. Good teams don’t sweat seeding, they don’t sweat home-ice advantage, they don’t sweat Game 80 against the Utah Hockey Club. The regular season becomes a means to an end, and the real games start when the puck drops on Game 1.

Flip the calendar to the playoffs, flip the switch to playoff mode. That’s what good teams do. That’s what tested teams do. That’s what the Stars believe they can and will do.

“We went into the playoffs last year on a heater and lost the first two to Vegas,” said Seguin, who returned to the lineup in the finale after undergoing hip surgery in December. “I was only a part of the last one, but we haven’t had a real meaningful game here in a few weeks. That’s where you test yourself as a group, when your back’s against the wall. We’re going to be ready.”

Robertson getting injured in the season finale is a tough body blow, and DeBoer deserves some heat for even having his top guys on the ice for such a pointless exercise as the 82nd game against a lottery team. But you can’t bubble-wrap these guys, either, and you can’t sit your best players for weeks at a time. Injuries happen. Good teams absorb them and overcome them. DeBoer noted the skill up and down the Stars lineup and said that while you never want to lose a key player, the kind of player Robertson is — a skilled scorer — is the kind of player the Stars can afford to lose.

Getting Seguin back — he had an assist 16 seconds into his return game on Wednesday — helps. On and off the ice. He’s played 133 playoff games, reaching the Stanley Cup Final with the Bruins and the Stars. He knows as well as anyone how to handle the highs and lows of playoff hockey.

“A lot of guys in here have been to the conference finals a lot lately,” he said. “We still have some guys from the bubble team (in 2020) going to the Final. So the experience is in here. For an unfortunate reason, you’ve got to lose a lot to win, and we’ve lost plenty here. We’ve gotten close. And you try to tap into those experiences. Last year, we had a conference-final (caliber) Round 1 against Vegas, and here we are against Colorado. We’ve been here before with hard paths. This is probably going to be the hardest one.”

Indeed, none of this is to say Dallas will walk all over the Avs and into the second round. The Stars haven’t won a championship in the Benn/Seguin era. They have a knack for making things difficult on themselves, having lost seven consecutive Game 1s. Yes, Heiskanen is a huge loss. Yes, Robertson is a huge loss. Yes, MacKinnon and Makar are terrifying.

But perhaps no team is better equipped on paper to handle such injuries. And few teams are better equipped between the ears. No, the Stars might not be heavy favorites in the marquee series of Round 1. But it’s foolish to call them heavy underdogs. At worst, this one’s a toss-up.

These are still the Dallas Stars, even if they’re limping and losing and lolling their way into the playoffs. Write them off at your own peril.

(Photo: Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)