One-hit wonders? The Avalanche championship dynasty crumbles less than a year after hoisting the Stanley Cup.

Where did the good times go? A scant 305 days after parading the Stanley Cup through the streets of Denver, the Avalanche dynasty crumbled.

With a 2-1 home loss on a sad Sunday night to an upstart Seattle team that had no business beating the defending NHL champs, the Avs unlaced their skates and headed home early from the playoffs, carrying with them hard questions that go far beyond woulda, shoulda, coulda.

Is this Colorado team, despite the star power of Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and Mikko Rantanen, a one-hit wonder?

Can Valeri Nichushkin, who mysteriously disappeared from this first-round series, be trusted as a key member of this squad going forward?

And if injured captain Gabe Landeskog, whose troubling knee injury cost him the entire season, can’t return to full health, might the roster need a major renovation instead of minor retooling?

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

“At the end of the day, you lost and there’s no participation trophies,” defenseman Erik Johnson said. “You either win or you go home.”

Johnson sat at his locker after the shocking loss, his eyes red and moist with the realization this might have been the last of nearly 800 games he has played wearing a burgundy and blue sweater.

Yes, this team should be applauded for battling adversity that has stalked it ever since the victory parade ended last June, with its second scoring line dismantled by free agency and injuries that relentlessly kicked their tails throughout the season.

“Tough year overall. During the season we’re going to say all the right things,” MacKinnon admitted. “But it’s hard missing guys.”

What we witnessed, however, was more than bad luck. Front-office execs Joe Sakic and Chris MacFarland did not do enough to re-invent and re-invigorate this team. The mysterious disappearance of Nichushkin during this series let down the Avs when they needed him most. Jared Bednar, philosophical instead of angry in defeat, was outcoached in this series by Seattle counterpart Dave Hakstol.

There are zero excuses when the defending champion gets bounced in the opening round.

“You get to the playoffs and you want to win, even if you don’t have the same team,” Rantanen said.

In the moments before the puck dropped in Game 7, a camera panned to an impossibly handsome man waving a sign that demanded “PLAYOFF NOISE” from the Ball Arena crowd. When the jumbotron revealed that movie-star mug belonged to none other than Landeskog in street clothes, the joint was jumping with good karma.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose, eh?

During the opening 20 minutes, I swear the ice tilted so hard in favor of the Avalanche, the Sea Monsters were in grave danger of falling off and going under. The shots after one period were 16-6 in favor of Colorado. MacKinnon was everywhere, dancing with the puck on his stick, firing lasers at the net, messing with the minds of Seattle players. But our old pal and Kraken goalie Philipp Grubauer got in the way of the party, saving his teammates from getting blown out before the first intermission.

“We played better than them,” Rantanen said. “But sometimes in hockey it doesn’t matter.”

You can probably guess what happened next. The hockey gods show no mercy for wasted opportunities; they punished the Avs for their squandering ways.

In the second period, the Kraken came to life.

We can’t make this stuff up: For the seventh time in seven games, Seattle tallied the first goal, when Oliver Bjorkstrand won a puck battle in the corner and flipped the puck toward the net for a greasy score in the kitchen of Avs goaltender Alexandar Georgiev. The air went out of the building, then the roof nearly caved in, when Bjorkstrand scored on a breakaway a little more than seven minutes deep into the period to stake the feisty visitors to a 2-0 lead.

But we know this: MacKinnon does not go quietly into that good night. On the power play, he fired a shot Grubauer never saw until it was in the back of the net, in no small part because the puck deflected off the moose-sized backside of Rantanen, allowing the Avs to cut their deficit in half only 28 seconds before the end of Period 2.

Perhaps the hockey gods have a heart, after all?

Well, maybe not so much.

After being teed up by defenseman Devon Toews early in the third period, MacKinnon ripped a long drive as awe-inspiring as any swing by Happy Gilmore in his prime. The blast left Grubauer helpless and the crowd went crazy, celebrating what everyone except Hakstol and his eagle-eyed support staff thought was a score that tied the game at 2-2.

The problem? Hakstol was certain his assistants had detected Artturi Lehkonen entering the zone offside an agonizing 17 seconds before MacKinnon’s shot and a video challenge erased the goal.

“That was a huge point, momentum-wise, with that goal being disallowed,” Hakstol said.

Alas … Colorado never got another shot past Grubauer, unquestionably the MVP of this series.