AND how ironic that the small-market, do-it-all-the-right-way Senators now take the hit from an NHL that’s more concerned about pushing everyone to the mediocre middle than it is with rewarding excellence.

So it is that Ottawa, the team that won the Presidents’ Trophy by finishing with the best record in the league, is now likely to face fifth-overall Philadelphia in one Eastern semifinal while the Devils, who finished second in the East and fourth overall, will play 12th-overall Tampa Bay, in the other.

Absurd, isn’t it, that the Devils could finish behind the Senators yet get an opponent that finished behind the one Ottawa will face in the next round of the tournament?

Yet that’s the result of the league’s nonsensical policy of awarding division champions a top-three conference seed for as long as they remain alive.

We can understand granting a division winner an automatic bid to the postseason party, but not the principle of rewarding an inferior team at the expense of a superior one, no matter what the round.

It’s bad enough that a conference-based schedule can produce a first-round match in which home ice goes to the team with the poorer record, but the folly only compounds itself when that inferior club maintains its favored-nation status into Round Two.

It’s convenient to claim that team and division strengths are cyclical, but a review of the record debunks that theory. The fact is, the Southeast champion has produced a record among the East’s top three only once in five years since the NHL went to its six-division format, that in 2000 when the Caps finished third.

The Lightning this year finished fifth in the East, yet leapfrogged both Philadelphia and Toronto for their advantageous seed. The Hurricanes finished seventh last year, yet used their three-seed to come out of the East. The Caps finished sixth in 2001; the Hurricanes, eighth, in 1999. Moreover, Southeast clubs – the Panthers and Thrashers, the remaining two – have fashioned the conference’s worst record outside its own division for five straight years.

And it makes sense. When the bar is low, so are the moves necessary to surmount it. Tampa – and the Lightning will be a tougher foe for the Devils than was Boston, make no mistake – didn’t have to build a championship team to win a division championship; the Lightning only had to be better than their four flawed competitors.

The Flyers and Maple Leafs finished three-four in the East, invested significant sums of money to take a run at the Cup, yet in the very first round were rewarded with each other for their trouble while the Lightning and Caps, five-six, got to play one another. So by definition a better team was guaranteed first-round elimination while an inferior one was guaranteed advancement.

The Board of Governors, less concerned with the league’s welfare than protecting individual turf, won’t even blink. Meanwhile, the Senators will get Philadelphia or Toronto while New Jersey gets Tampa Bay in a matchup so magnetic, the games will all be televised on ESPN6.