GAME FIVE RECAP (Flyers 3, Penguins 0)

Hey, wait. This did not go the way it was supposed to go. The storyline I had worked out called, predictably, for the home team to come out stormin' behind the throaty, white-clad crowd. They'd knock an early goal in against the Flyers, then as the Flyers opened things up to try to get back to square, the Penguins would get a second goal. Biron and the guys playing in front of him would think back to last year's Game Five, a 6-0 beatdown, and they'd wilt. By 9:30 there would be a handshake line at center ice and I'd be turning over to the third period of the Jersey-Carolina game to do a little advance scouting.

Well, the Penguins got the "come out stormin'" part right for the first twenty minutes. They threw fifteen shots at Martin Biron and played their best period since Game One. They won faceoffs and battles along the boards, stayed out of the penalty box and created some sustained pressure. In fact, they did everything but score. Biron inverted the Game Four storyline and played out of his mind. On their first power play, Sid won three offensive-zone draws and the Penguins got off five quality shots, but Biron turned them all away. As has been the case, the Staal-Kennedy-Cooke line played the best of the Penguins' lines at even-strength, and at one point in the first period Kennedy and Staal were alone behind the net with the puck. Biron expected Staal to come out on one side of the net and shaded over, only to have Kennedy take the puck the other way and peel around for a wrap-around. Biron was hung out to dry, and the puck would have been behind him and off the back of the net and back out before he had a chance to take his eyes of Jordan Staal. Winning the first goal battle has been, for all practical purposes, like winning the game in this playoff year. And it was right there for the taking. And then it was still right there, as the pitch was so fat that Kennedy got the yips and shot before his stick had cleared the post. His shot glanced harmlessly off the side of the net, and the dream was deferred.

There's no TK-dissing here. He's consistently been the best wing skating for the Penguins in this series. And if he didn't have such great chemistry with Staal and Cooke, I'd say he's earned time skating alongside either Crosby or Malkin.

Things fell apart from the start of the second period onward. I was liberated from sitting through the second, and as a result missed the Flyers' first goal and the disallowed tying goal that Evgeni Malkin kicked in. Apparently some piece of equipment in Atlanta was struck by lightning, and it killed the cable and satellite feed for forty-five minutes or so.

And so the series goes back to Philadelphia. Dan Bylsma, regrettably, has to figure out not only how to get a better effort out of his team, but also has to fall on his sword and reverse his lineup changes. Hey, I was all for doing something to prod Petr Sykora back to relevance, but I still can't understand scratching Kris Letang for Philip Boucher. Letang took a slash in Tuesday's game, but he wasn't replaced for injury reasons; he'd finished the last couple of games at -1, and when he got into a few late regular-season games, Boucher had a lot of success at getting shots from the point through traffic and onto the net. But it's tough for defensemen, even veterans, to get thrown midseries into the speed of playoff hockey, and Boucher brought home a -2 and direct responsibility for the Flyers' second goal when he tried to pass the puck out of the defensive zone rather than merely clearing it, and the resultant picked-off pass was sent over to the Flyers' Claude Giroux, who sent it into the net. A 1-0 third-period deficit is tough to overcome as it is, but 2-0 is pretty well insurmountable. Plus, this makes two years in a row that Letang has been scratched in the playoffs. His performance in the past has been up-and-down in proportion to his confidence, so undermining him at this point wasn't Disco Dan's best move.