ANAHEIM — The ceremony took 29 minutes.

Or, if you want to take the long view, it required 13 years and 29 minutes — that being the elapsed time between the founding of Anaheim's NHL franchise and its first Stanley Cup championship.

Either way, on Wednesday the Ducks capped a summer of celebrating the title won last spring by raising division, conference and Stanley Cup championship banners to the rafters of the Honda Center, to the clear approval of a roaring sellout crowd of 17,285.

"Every guy that was a part of the team last year should really enjoy that moment," said goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere, who took part in the ceremony, but not the ensuing game, as he continues his recovery from hernia surgery.

"We worked extremely hard to get to that. I think it's very important for our organization. I think it's the same for the fans. ... That banner is as much for them, as it is for us."

And so, for everyone on the team and in the seats, this was another chance to acknowledge a great achievement.

It was also the signal that it's time to forget about it.

After four months as the toast of hockey, the Ducks face a new challenge: Developing a sort of competitive amnesia, in which they forget the result of the 2007 playoffs but remember what it took to achieve that result.

Forget the long celebration on the night June 6 — a party on the ice and in the locker room that stretched into the wee hours of June 7 — when the Ducks beat Ottawa 6-2 to win the Cup. Forget the local-boy-makes-good events held from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Togliatti, Russia, as each player had his personal night with the Cup.

Forget the rings players received on Monday. And forget the banner that went up at 7:21 p.m., even though it will be hanging above the ice long after the Pond/Honda Center has gone through another two or three sponsorship-driven name changes.

Fun as it may have been, that long party is over. The new season has not only begun, it's six games old. And with the Ducks off to less than a resounding start — even with Wednesday's 2-1 win over Boston, they're just -1 — there is some urgency in the need to switch focus from last spring to this fall.

"It's a new year," said Chris Pronger, the newly minted Ducks captain. "We're one of 30 teams vying to win it this year. It's a completely new year. You've got to turn the page and get back to work."

Coach Randy Carlyle would certainly like to see that happen.

"Coaches can't live in the past," said Carlyle. "Neither can players. And we have to formulate a plan and continue to push to get our team playing at a level where we think we can have success."

Of course, it's not quite that easy to move on. Not when you've got a game starting nine minutes after that banner goes up. Not when your team is waiting to see when (or if) it will regain the services of three key figures from that championship run: Giguere and the guys working on a world record for mulling over retirement, playoff MVP Scott Niedermayer and regular-season scoring leader Teemu Selanne.

(The crowd, doing its part to get those two off the fence, engaged in a couple of renditions of a spirited "One More Year" chant during the ceremony. "Pretty convincing, I guess," said Niedermayer later when asked for a reaction, who nonetheless was not convinced enough to announce his return.) The league is not going to politely wait for those players to reach a decision, or for the rest of the players to get the emotional hangover from that championship champagne out of their system.

"I think closure is something that's easier said than done on an individual basis," said Carlyle. "For a team, I think the closure's already happened, when we played our first game.

"I think that it's our responsibility as professionals to understand the situation that you're in, and perform. Have we performed to a high enough level? Probably not. And we're still searching for that."

Now that the last official act of the 2007 championship is behind them, that search should be the only thing that matters.

— For more on the Ducks, check David Lassen's blog, "All Over The Place," at VenturaCountyStar.com. His e-mail is dlassen@VenturaCountyStar.com.