The Portage Terriers' road to a third-straight Turnbull Cup starts tonight.

The Dogs finished the Manitoba Junior Hockey League Regular Season in fifth place and will be taking on the Selkirk Steelers in their opening playoffs series. Game 1 is tonight in Selkirk.

"We won the first three meetings of the season and they won the last three," says Blake Spiller, general manager and head coach of the Terriers. "I think Selkirk kind of showed us a couple of weaknesses in our defensive game in the last couple (matches). At the same time, after watching a lot of the video, we definitely had chances to win the last two to keep ourselves in the mix for second place. We're kind of feeling a little fortunate that we're only going down the road and not heading up seven hours to OCN, especially with the way the weather has been."

The Steelers won three games over Portage in February, twice in Selkirk and once at Stride Place. The Terriers were 3-2-1 to end the season and Jeremey Leipsic feels they found a little bit of the consistency they were looking for heading into the postseason.

"I think that's one thing we were looking for heading into the end of the year," says Leipsic. "We wanted to go into playoffs playing the right way and I think we found that, and we're looking to build off of it in Game 1 tonight."

"I think we match up pretty well against them," admits Terriers' captain Riley Thiessen. "We just need to get back to what we did at the start of the season that worked for us. Use our speed, keep it simple, and get pucks on net."

Blake Spiller's looking forward to a tough series. "They've got some guys that can score and they've been getting sound goaltending. I think it's going to be a good series, hopefully, we'll get off to a good start and get some confidence that way."

You can catch every game of the series on CFRY and at Portage Online. Puck drop is 7:30 tonight, the pre-game show starts at 7:20 p.m