RALEIGH, N.C. — It’s all so weird to Brett Pesce. So weird. The New Jersey Devils’ team hotel is not far from where he lived in Raleigh, the neighborhood still so familiar. He played 35 playoff games in what’s now the Lenovo Center as a member of the home team, and Sunday afternoon was his first as a visitor.

Things that feel so familiar are now so foreign. A place that felt like home is now enemy territory. Everything he knew about postseason hockey has been turned on its head.

And still, some things never change, like the feeling when he hit the ice and felt the energy swirling around him, even if it was directed elsewhere for the first time in his career.

“I loved it. I love that rink,” Pesce said Monday, a day after the Hurricanes opened the series with a 4-1 win. “The fans are passionate, loud and excited for their team. I always appreciate that. The louder the better for me. It’s why you play the game, right? Playoff hockey’s the best.”

He would know. Pesce spent his whole career with the Carolina Hurricanes — from draft at 18 and debut at 20 to departure at 30 – only to meet them in his first playoff campaign elsewhere. Of all the first-round series in all the towns in all the world, he had to walk into this one.

But that’s pro sports, a mercenary business at heart. Pesce isn’t alone in that regard among the Devils; Stefan Noesen’s in his first season with New Jersey after two with the Hurricanes. Dougie Hamilton helped the Hurricanes end their playoff drought in 2019 before moving on to the Devils two years later.

Then there’s Erik Haula, who is less fondly remembered, as much for his antics since leaving as much as anything in his brief stint here. He doesn’t have Martin Necas to bully anymore, but the Hurricanes still have a chance to end his postseason for the fourth straight time, something Vincent Trocheck and Eric Staal both did to the Hurricanes in recent years, among others.

But none of them was with the Hurricanes for so long, and only the Hurricanes for so long before running into them again so quickly like this. Pesce was a pivotal figure in the Hurricanes’ rise from cannon fodder to Cup contender, enduring the last three years of the drought before participating in the first six years of the Hurricanes’ playoff streak, if not the seventh. He was as much a fixture on the blue line for those years as Jaccob Slavin, not one of the team’s biggest stars but no less beloved among fans.

“He’s a great player,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “There’s a reason they went and grabbed him out of free agency, right? And there’s a reason we wanted to keep him. It’s all part of it. He’s not on our team anymore. We’ll always be friends and he’ll always be part of the Hurricanes family. But not these couple weeks.”

The Hurricanes and Pesce went their separate ways last July, only to be thrown back together this April. The hockey gods laughed in his face, not only pitting him against his only former team, but giving him months to muse on a matchup that was all but preordained.

“Thankfully, it just seemed like this series has kind of been aligning since December, or whenever it was, so you have some time to mentally prepare for that,” Pesce said. “Obviously, it’s a little weird, right? I have a lot of friends, great friends, on that other side. But at the end of the day it’s a playoff series, and there’s no friends any more until the series is over. Just two teams battling to win.”

On a team that looked, as Pesce put it, “a little nervous” in Game 1, the Devils will be expecting postseason veterans like Pesce to lead the way as they try to pick up a win on the road before heading back to Newark. Only a handful of players on their roster have more experience than Pesce, all of it until Sunday earned here — somewhere that still feels like home, even if it’s not.

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