Meaningless. All is meaningless.

That Biblical translation of Solomon’s assessment of life as he knew it in the Book of Ecclesiastes (“vanity,” if you fancy King James English) doubles nicely as a description of the regular season in the four major team sports.

Spring isn’t the most convenient time to camp in front of the television and bathe in hoops and hockey, but it makes a heck of a lot more sense than engaging in that same activity in winter.

If the intense competition that unfolded Thursday night and early Friday morning didn’t aptly demonstrate that truth, nothing will.

For sheer drama, your remote control will never entitle you to a more stirring doubleheader than the Anaheim Mighty Ducks extinguishing the Dallas Stars in five overtimes and the Minnesota Timberwolves draining the Los Angeles Lakers in merely two extra sessions.

Take it from someone who appreciates hockey but doesn’t worship at its altar; there may be nothing better in sports than the Stanley Cup playoffs. There also is no more miserably dragged-out formality than the NHL regular season.

We’re two weeks into the playoffs, and already two of the teams that dominated the last half-decade and who pictured themselves hoisting the holy grail once again this June, the Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche, are working on their fairway woods and short irons.

The unpredictability is enough to captivate even the most dispassionate hockey observer. Watching this much competitive fire burning in the first and second rounds makes you wonder how much fun we’ll have when all the have-nots are left to ponder nothing but their tee times.

Obviously unwilling to take a back seat to its ice-bound cousins, the NBA has proven that the NHL doesn’t have a monopoly on uncertainty and jagged fingernails.

Eight first-round basketball playoff series are in progress. In five of them, the lower-seeded team swiped one of the first two games on foreign hardwood.

Pretty soon, home-court advantage is something we’ll have to stutter and stammer when we explain it to our kids, right along with Disco, Atari and rabbit ears. We can couple that with the discussion of why CBS used to show NBA Finals games on tape delay.

Knowing the extraneous nature of the regular season, most of us jumped the bandwagon, expecting the Lakers to climb from their No. 5 seed to a fourth consecutive championship.

Too bad we haven’t placed that much faith in the Celtics, another thus-far underachieving team that reached the conference finals last season and seems to be hitting its stride. Don’t know about you, but it’s been a wondrous flashback watching the gang in green take former Pistons pain-in-the-neck and current Pacers coach Isiah Thomas to school.

Basketball and hockey aren’t the only ones demonstrating how silly it is to waste a perfectly good evening watching regular-season, glorified exhibition fare.

As more rounds are added to the playoffs in every team sport in the interest of the almighty buckaroo, the day-to-day standings universally mean less.

Anybody know how many times the team with the best regular-season record in baseball has won the World Series since 1990? Once. You can look it up. The 1998 New York Yankees.

In football, the way things are now, go 12-4 and people start comparing you to the Steel Curtain or the Super Bowl Shufflin’ Bears.

While greatness and domination aren’t what they used to be, one thing may be said about the current state of professional sports: Every step of the playoffs is utterly fascinating.

We are forced to watch. And wonder why we watched anything that led up to it.

Kalle Oakes is sports editor. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].