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Flyers' ebbs and flows are reminders of so-so Phillies teams

Back in the early part of the previous decade, before they reeled off five straight division championships, the Phillies immediately followed one great winning streak with a losing streak of equal strength, giving away hard-fought gains in the standings in the process.

While such ebbs and flows are part of nearly every team's season, the nagging frequency and recurrence by which those Phillies teams ran them off was not. They affected morale, enthusiasm and ultimately faith, and were as big a reason as any that Larry Bowa's final stint as a manager ended just two seasons short of the Phillies' first division championship.

Bowa's well-known volatility - even in a football-oriented town that often mistakenly sees that as a baseball attribute - didn't help things. But the bigger source of inconsistency was the talent itself, and more precisely, the pitching. As Forrest Gump would say with a mouthful of chocolate, "You never know what you're gonna get.'' This is no way to build toward a championship.

This leads me to the Flyers and their current struggles, in which they have been on the losing side of the ledger in nine of 11 games. This of course followed their hopeful 10-game winning streak, and for anyone with a memory of even a few months, harkened to the first six weeks of this uneven season, when neither of two goalies who fancy themselves as No. 1s could hold even the more tepid NHL offenses off the scoreboard enough to win.

The Flyers were 9-10-1 on Nov.25 before that 10-game winning streak pushed them into the playoff conversation. Seven of those victories occurred at home, but given their home struggles in recent years, it still suggested a team that was putting pieces together for a strong second-half push.

Steve Mason was the goaltender for most of those wins, and for most, he was solid and sometimes outstanding. But he was also the backstopper replaced at the start of the season by Michael Neuvirth, and Mason's game seems to have gone south again at precisely the time Neuvirth has returned to health.

Mason has mildly refuted the suggestion that he was overworked during the stretch, even if evidence pointed that way. The guy he idolized as a kid, Marty Brodeur, played 70 games perennially through his spectacular career, and Mason's goal has always been to be dependable like that.

Yet there is this impression he keeps leaving that a rival makes him play worse rather than better, an impression he didn't exactly work to dispel when he lamented a lack of practice time to work out some bad habits in a column by the Inquirer's Mike Sielski over the weekend.

Mason actually excelled toward the end of last season when he had to be overworked for the Flyers to even reach the playoffs. So that might be truer for his teammates than it is for him. You know what else is true? In baseball, bats - and gloves - tend to suffer when the pitching is undependable. It seems to work in a similar way with a hockey team and its goaltending.

There's more talent on this Flyers team than in recent seasons, which is why I still think they will emerge from this funk and make the playoffs. But until someone from their long list of prospects emerges as a real No. 1, these ebbs and flows seem inevitable.