Rains like hell

~

Congratulations to the Boston Bruins. Who showed up longer, played harder, and beat the nougat out of my favorite hockey team.

I've got to say, the team and The Buffalo News beat my expectations. I expected ref-blaming, hero coddling, and hard-luck-town whining. The implication that failure is Authentic.

This is an all rustbelt blog, so you know what I'm talking about.

But no. Truth was told.

"Name me a team that's won a series and blew two [Three. -sic] leads and has gone 0-for on the power play," Sabres right wing Jason Pominville said. "You're probably not going to find one."

The Bruins' power play finished the series with six goals on 22 chances. The Sabres will spend the offseason thinking about no power-play goals in the playoffs, failing to connect on all 19 opportunities.

They'll also be haunted by blowing two-goal leads in Games Two and Four, giving Boston a prime opportunity to advance.

Unfortunately for the Sabres, they also won't find Tim Connolly and Derek Roy in the goal column. The team's top point producers from the regular season finished with no goals in six games.

Yeah, that Tim Connolly. Don't get me started.

It's more than that the boys beat themselves. Clocking out for whole periods and painting their shorts at the worst possible times. 

It's larger than a team with a division title, 100 points, an Olympic goaltender, a Norris Trophy defense, and real scoring depth. A team who found it in them to be small, scattered and helpless the instant a bracket appeared.

It's a joke I made in the Spring of 2007, at Kinsale Tavern in New York. In that year of hope, noise and unidentified stains on my jersey. We watched our #1 squad overskate, under perform, and look so shaky on the Power Play that I got up on a chair and started waving off penalties with the NFL "Decline" gesture.
 

Can't touch this.

Okay. I may have just been waving my arms and yelling. But that's how other people interpreted it.

It caught on. And as we gave up rushes and flamed out in the Finals, half the bar would be booing and Declining every time the Senators took a penalty.

Three years four time zones and huge changes to our roster later, I made that exact same joke here in Seattle. And it applied.

I don't believe in goat magic. I don't believe in curses. I don't know if there's something in the water or something in the social consensus or both or what. Buffalo sports teams are at their worst in times of opportunity. Give our guys a shot, and skills will fade, excuses will be farmed, and our Molson Ice will be salty with weeping.

An entire town will warmly, cosily embrace it.

I don't know if new players or a new special teams coach will fix this. I don't know if it's a thing that wants to be fixed. I don't really know what kind of a thing it is.

But I watched a different 20 guys, running a different game plan in a different year, against a different team.

And they were so faithful to the old mistakes, I swear they were hockey Lost Causers. Re-enacting old defeats in authentic uniforms. Performing the town ritual.

There's ... always ... next year.

Go Blackhawks?