<p>"It was only last month that the hockey playoffs finally ended, but the new season has started today." </p>
<p>The answer is has started. It should be started.</p>
<p>Can anyone explain to me why that is? Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>Well if you look at the sentence, it uses the words "was" and "finally", meaning that it has already happened. was=future tense, finally=future tense, and "has started" does not make sense in the sentence anyway. this explanation doesn't make sense and i struggle with the writing section as well so i don't know what i'm talking about. I think it has to do with tenses though, it's confusing.</p>
<p>^ and because "has" signifies present tense, and "started" is past tense. so it is sort of like superfluous information.</p>
<p>Saying "it has started already" is superfluous, because you can just say "it started already"</p>
<p>that's the way i thought of it, i don't know if it's correct or not? ><</p>
<p>It has to do with parallelism (although this really isn't a valid question as it is certainly arguable that the sentence is correct as is). You can say that "it has ended, but something else has started" or "it ended, but something else started." However, you cannot say "it ended, but something has started." I wouldn't consider that an error, though.</p>