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Spent Flyers vs. NHL's best team turns ugly

THEY'RE GASSED. It shows in the plays they make - or, more accurately, don't make. The puck finally moves around on the power play, the open man gets the cross-ice feed, and instead of firing immediately, Claude Giroux's legs are a half-stride late, delaying the shot, allowing Braden Holtby to position himself.

THEY'RE GASSED.

It shows in the plays they make - or, more accurately, don't make. The puck finally moves around on the power play, the open man gets the cross-ice feed, and instead of firing immediately, Claude Giroux's legs are a half-stride late, delaying the shot, allowing Braden Holtby to position himself.

Jakub Voracek is late to a fat rebound in Game 1. Matt Read seems late for everything. He and Brayden Schenn get called for the kind of slashes that come from tired legs.

Reaching. Poking. Hoping.

Shayne Gostisbehere misses the net by feet with his booming shot. His whiplike stick checks, so effective in turning opponents over, are now negated by the healthy distance he keeps from the puck, lest he gets skated past. He loses the puck as he skates untouched through the neutral zone, a scene rarely if ever seen during his incredible rookie season.

And the goaltender who played 12 straight games down the stretch, including three sets of back-to-back games? There were no goals scored from 100 feet Monday night, but the Capitals' third goal was scored after a wide shot from Justin Williams flopped from Steve Mason's glove and practically onto the unchecked stick of Evgeny Kuznetsov directly in front of his net.

This is no time for a tired team to run up against the NHL's best team, a team so far ahead of the others that it spent the last month of the season basically resting up for the postseason, for this series. But if you're watching the plays made and, more strikingly, the ones not made, it is hard to come up with an alternate theory for the primary reason the Flyers face a quick elimination at the Wells Fargo Center after Monday night's 6-1 beating from the Caps.

"We just have to go one goal at a time," Giroux said. "And we're a streaky team, so you know what? Get one game and you never know what could happen."

Their best line, at least the one that consistently created havoc and limited opportunity, is their fourth. It's the line that saw less ice time than the rest during that grueling, improbable grab at the final playoff spot.

It's also the line that punctuated this unnatural disaster of a game with an all-out brawl after Pierre-Edouard Bellemare checked Dmitry Orlov headfirst into the boards behind his net. When the fights ended, the entire line was tossed, the Caps awarded a five-minute power play, and the flashing wristbands issued to fans entering the arena to commemorate team chairman Ed Snider's life were sent to the ice in such number that they ultimately incurred another penalty.

"Not too fun," Giroux said of the debris-littered ice. "We take a lot of pride playing in front of our fans . . . That's our identity."

This was the game they had to win. This was the game they thought they could win. With a moving tribute to Snider fueling both the emotions of the 19,678 on hand and the players on the ice, the Flyers came out the way everyone hoped they would, electrifying the place with Michael Raffl's early goal, making it seem, at least for a while, as if the Washington Capitals were the team down a pair of games.

"Crazy," Raffl said after that period ended. "It was so much fun and emotional the first 10 minutes. People were going wild. It was absolutely amazing."

And unsustainable. There will be talk today as there was after Games 1 and 2 about the disparity in special teams, and appropriately so. But again, it seems a by-product of a team without its legs.

"When you're not disciplined enough, you're going to get punished," the Flyers' Mark Streit was saying afterward.

He also said this: "It seems like the pucks just go back to them. And we have a hard time clearing them. And when you get stuck out there for 40 seconds, it gets tougher and tougher."

The Capitals scored five power-play goals, although the last two came after everyone, players and fans, seemed to have quit.

The convenient narrative is to say the Flyers' late chairman would have been appalled, but his legacy includes some memorable meltdowns of his own in similar situations. If the Flyers weren't going to reverse the tone of this series, then a line brawl on a night when images of hairy toothless gladiators graced the screen above the ice, a night when Dave Schultz was in the house, really doesn't seem that inappropriate.

Before the game, Kimmo Timonen recalled his greatest Flyers memory, the game he will carry with him until his final days. Game 7 in Boston in 2010, he said, when the Flyers rallied from an 0-3 hole in games and a three-goal deficit in the last game to defeat the Bruins and advance to the Eastern Conference finals.

"And Mr. Snider was in the locker room, shaking everyone's hands," Timonen said. "And he was crying. He was really crying."

Maybe the old man is just setting us up.

It would be fun to believe that. And it would require not believing your eyes.

@samdonnellon

Columns: ph.ly/Donnellon