Flyers fail to repeat miracle comeback, are swept by Bruins

BOSTON - This time there was no miracle on Causeway Street.

Contrary to popular belief, history cannot be made every May in Boston, and not every 3-0 deficit is surmountable.

"It's our fault," Claude Giroux said. "We always put ourselves in bad situations. It's difficult to come back every time."

The stat sheet says it was Johnny Boychuk who fired the bullet from the blue line only 2 minutes, 42 seconds into the third period last night, making the Flyers' official time of death 10:06 p.m. - though the death certificate could have been stamped only 2 minutes into Wednesday night's Game 3 here at TD Garden.

Each cat only has so many lives, and the Flyers' ninth life was scratched off last night by a bigger, hungrier bear. There are only so many times you can flirt with death before its ugly and cold hands win out.

Skating with about as much desperation last night as in an afternoon game in November instead of an elimination game, the Flyers became the 24th NHL team to book a tee time at the country club with their 5-1 loss to the Bruins.

With the loss, the Flyers were miserably swept out of the playoffs for the first time since bowing out to Detroit in the 1997 Stanley Cup finals. Let the record show that the Flyers held the lead in their Eastern Conference semifinal series with the Bruins for a little more than 13 minutes and scored a total of only seven goals in four games.

"We were just a little bit off, playing just a little bit from behind," Sean O'Donnell said. "We put ourselves behind the eight ball. Sometimes, it seemed that this team enjoyed playing with our backs up against the wall and then responding. It caught up to us."

There is a reason last year's comeback was nothing short of a miracle. In all three professional sports who use a seven-game series to decide a victor, teams that garner a three-game lead are now 291-4.

Boston, which advanced past the second round for the first time since 1992, will face Tampa Bay in the Eastern Conference finals beginning next week.

"It's difficult whenever you end the season with a loss," Mike Richards said. "I'm not sure where it went wrong. It's a slippery slope when you stop playing your brand of hockey."

Last night, the Flyers did not play their brand of hockey. The problem was that it was more the norm over the past 3 months of the season instead of an irregularity.

Last night, the Flyers entered the lion's den lacking the heart and gumption to win. They took an early 5-2 lead in shots before their parade to the penalty box finally cost them in this series.

Milan Lucic pounded in a power-play goal after a tic-tac-toe passing play to put the Bruins ahead only 12 minutes into the game.

The Flyers went a total of 19:35, spanning parts of two periods, with only one shot on net. It was hardly a performance that reeked of any kind of desperation.

"I thought we would come out hard," Scott Hartnell said. "When you come out on the wrong side of things, it's tough to swallow. They deserved it more. They played hard. Maybe it was their turn this year."

It would not have been the Flyers, though, to go down without a fight.

And it appeared, in the waning minutes of the second period, that one bounce of the puck - over Bruins forward Brad Marchand's stick just outside the Flyers' blue line - might have been the bounce that saved the Flyers' season.

Richards bolted up ice, dishing the puck to partner-in-crime Kris Versteeg before screening a chasing Dennis Seidenberg, which allowed Versteeg enough time to plant the puck above Tim Thomas' right shoulder on a breakaway to knot the game at 1-1.

Still, after two periods, the Flyers had nearly as many penalties (eight) as they did shots on net (13). That won't produce any victories in May. And yet, the Flyers were still ticking.

Not anymore.

Boychuk's blast from the point, which was so quick that starter du jour Sergei Bobrovsky didn't have time to react to it, was the nail in the coffin. The three goals scored after - two into an empty net - were just exclamation points for the Bruins.

"It's disappointing to end with a loss every year, especially with the team that we had and the confidence that we had in each other," Richards said. "It sucks, there's no other way to put it, really."

For a team that led the Eastern Conference consecutively for 54 games and entered the season with legitimate Stanley Cup dreams, it was a bitter but inevitable end. Where exactly the downfall started - sometime in late February, perhaps with a loss to Phoenix at home - is up for debate.

Why no player, coach or executive was able to clot the bleeding, is fair to question.

An official autopsy will follow, with careful summer surgery by general manager Paul Holmgren already scheduled for July.

"The objective is to go as far as you can or as long as you can," coach Peter Laviolette said. "We didn't do that."

Chris Pronger (lower-body injury) was scratched from the lineup for the third straight game and his eighth game of the playoffs . . . Forward Nik Zherdev (healthy scratch) was subbed out of the lineup in favor of Jody Shelley, who played only 3:13 for the game . . . The Flyers posted 23 shots in Game 4, their lowest total of the playoffs . . . This was the second time the Flyers have been swept by Boston in a playoff series, the first time since the 1977 semifinals.

For more news and analysis, read Frank Seravalli's blog, Frequent Flyers, at

www.philly.com/FrequentFlyers. Follow him on Twitter at

http://twitter.com/DNFlyers.