History is on the line when Game 1 of the ECHL Kelly Cup Finals gets underway exclusively on FloHockey at 7:05 PM on Friday night.

The South Carolina Stingrays – who have been forced to host games all postseason long at the Carolina Ice Palace, a far more intimate setting than their usual North Charleston Coliseum digs that are currently booked with other events – make their league-record seventh appearance in the Finals and will go for a league-record fourth championship, albeit with an arena capacity at less than 10 percent of what they were used to all during the regular season.

They’ll host Games 1 and 2 (Sunday, 6:05 PM ET) before the series shifts to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the Fort Wayne Komets will have home-ice advantage for Game 3 (Wednesday, 7:30 PM) and a potential Game 4 (Friday, 8 PM) and Game 5 (Saturday, 7:30 PM) in the best-of-five-series, with all playoff rounds this year having been shortened from the usual seven games.

Weird year, right? Here’s the kicker. While the 13 teams who opted in to play at the start of the season played anywhere from 68-72 games, Fort Wayne was the lone franchise that took the option of a later start, and played in just 51 games, earning a postseason berth through a points-percentage format that had been agreed to before the season began. Although they’re the Western Conference Champion, they largely played Eastern Conference opponents, including a three-game set in South Carolina that the Stingrays swept by a combined score of 12-4 between March 19-21.

The Stingrays were the last ECHL team to clinch a playoff berth; they took the Eastern Conference’s fourth and final spot by virtue of a six-game winning streak to end the season, and then scored a huge first-round upset win over the Florida Everblades before moving on and taking out the Greenville Swamp Rabbits to advance to the Final.

As for the Komets, they scored a dramatic Game 5, overtime win against the Wichita Thunder to knock them out in the semis, and took out the Allen Americans in the conference final to get to this point. After joining the ECHL prior to the start of the 2012-13, a win in the Kelly Cup Final would be the first in league history for the Komets, while another title for the Stingrays would break their three-way tie of three Cups with defunct-franchises Alaska and Hampton Roads.

Andrew Cherniwchan paces South Carolina in the postseason with four goals while Matthew Weis has nine points (3g-6a) to share a tie for the overall playoff lead. Max Gottlieb has five assists, which is tied for first among defensemen, and his five points are tied for third among blueliners.

Fort Wayne is led in the playoffs by Anthony Nellis, who is tied for the playoff lead with five goals and nine points, and Stephen Harper, who has a playoff-best seven assists and is also tied for the overall lead with nine points. Harper’s nine points paces all rookies in the Kelly Cup Playoffs while Oliver Cooper is tied for second among first-year players with three goals. Randy Gazzola is second among defensemen with two goals.

The likely starting goaltenders will be Fort Wayne’s Dylan Ferguson, who reached the NHL under an emergency call-up situation out of juniors to the Vegas Golden Knights back in the 2017-18 season, and Hunter Shepard, who led Minnesota-Duluth to back-to-back national titles at the NCAA level in 2018 and 2019.

Ferguson has played all but 23 minutes for Fort Wayne through the first two rounds of the playoffs with a 5-3 record, one shutout, a 3.01 goals-against average and a save percentage of .902. The 22-year-old leads all goaltenders in the playoffs with 240 saves and is tied for first with 519 minutes played.

For South Carolina, Shepard has been a workhouse as well, playing all but 20 minutes of the Stingrays nine contests; he’s tied for the playoff lead with 519 minutes played and is second with 234 saves.

Information from a league press release was used in part to create this story.