Game-changer
Clearly, this was the way it was going to have to be for a team that makes nothing easy.
The Bruins and Canadiens will meet tonight in a Game 7, a matter we probably should have seen as a foregone conclusion even before the puck dropped last night. That’s not a statement on the suspect refereeing (though there was that too), but yet this franchise’s repeated blows to the psyche of its fan base.
The numbers have become about as synonymous and gut-checking as 1918, which only managed to linger for a life-span. It’s been 39 years since the Bruins brought a Stanley Cup back to Boston. It’s been 17 years since they even managed to win a playoff Game 7. That was on April 29, 1994, when Ray Bourque, Glen Wesley, Ted Donato, Fred Knipscheer, Adam Oates (On the power play, would you believe it?), and Glen Murray all scored in a 5-3 win over the Canadiens. It might as well have been Dit Clapper and Lionel Hitchman for all the contemporary significance that result holds heading into tonight.
And so, it will be another Game 7, less than one year after an epic collapse in a deciding game that still may yet have long-term repercussions on this franchise. Claude Julien and Peter Chiarelli managed to keep their jobs after that failure against the Flyers. If they lose tonight, forgive and forget won’t come so easily. Nor will it be so with the fans, who come back year after year even with the inevitable ways their team manages to end a season in heartbreak.
It’s better to have loved than to not have loved at all. That’s a cliché many a Bruins fan might argue.
Lose tonight, and it’s time to throw in the towel and figure out how to start anew. Again. Yet. Again. Bruins fans, to their credit, stuck around in droves following last year’s 3-0, 3-0 breakdown. They came into this season with a renewed vigor, the kind of hunger rampant in these parts in the months after Aaron Boone launched a Tim Wakefield offering into the early-morning sky in the Bronx. With hunger comes a significant ecstasy when satisfied, a time to revel in the glory of achieving something you’ve long ached for.
But these Bruins, boy do they make it hard.
It’s not the losing, but they way they’re losing. They are the modern day Red Sox with a new twist every season. That 3-2 OT loss to the Hurricanes in 2009 wasn’t bad enough? Enter 2010 and the Flyers series. And even though it can’t possibly get worse than what occurred on the night of May 14, 2010, I’m sure they’ll have something up their sleeves. They always do.
Do you realize our great friends to the north are whining over the fact that no team has brought the Stanley Cup to Canadian soil since the 1993 Habs? Eighteen years. Eighteen years. No disrespect to the good people of Canada – we’re not so proud about the Ducks and Hurricanes having their names etched on the Cup either – but 18 years isn’t exactly over the hill, which is what it will be in Boston should this drought eke into 2012.
If they lose tonight, all the hard work and energy this franchise has done in pulling itself off the scrap heap of the NHL will be in start-over mode. The buzz will simmer, puttering out into next season when the Bruins will once again begin a campaign of false hope. Eternal bridesmaids.
And if they win, they get the Flyers. Oh, good. Pass the rum.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com