PHILADELPHIA -- 'You can still get it."
Bernie Parent looks more today like a riverboat card dealer - styled silver hair, clipped Van Dyke beard - than the goaltender who won two most valuable player awards bringing Stanley Cups to this city in the early 1970s, but the words have not changed.
"There's still a Philly flu," he says. "Only it's different. It used to be out on the ice, but now it's mostly in the crowd. When we won, I used to say 75 per cent of our success was the crowd."
Last night, it might have been closer to 100 per cent at the beginning of the Flyers' 3-2 victory over the Montreal Canadiens, giving Philadelphia a 2-1 lead in this best-of-seven playoff series.
There was really no need of the scoreboard announcer welcoming "the most intimidating fans in hockey" to the Wachovia Center. They know who they are - a crowd that would have made the lions wet themselves in Nero's Rome.
The atmosphere in the lead-up to the game was, well, surly, both inside and outside the Flyers' rink.
"Spit on the Canadians!" one man shouted as several fans in Montreal colours paraded by.
At the turnstiles, they handed out orange T-shirts with Crush the Canadiens! stencilled across the chest. They flashed Vengeance Now! across the wraparound scoreboard.
They offered a blistering booing in accompaniment of the Canadian anthem and cheered through a long rendition of God Bless America, with Lauren Hart, daughter of the late Flyers play-by-play announcer Gene Hart, joining in a duet with the late Kate Smith, Smith coming in from her own dimension courtesy dated videotape.
They dressed in orange, it seemed all of them, with some of the jerseys dating back to Bobby Clarke and Bernie Parent and Dave (The Hammer) Schultz and Bob (Hound Dog) Kelly and the rest of the Broad Street Bullies who brawled their way to Stanley Cups in 1974 and 1975.
They were handed blowup orange thundersticks and, for a select few, blowup sledgehammers just in case the visiting Canadiens didn't get the point.
The scoreboard announcer predicted a "nasty, bloodthirsty" game to answer the "nasty" Montreal Canadien, Tom Kostopoulos, who offered up that controversial face wash to the Flyers' Kimmo Timonen to end the previous game in Montreal, which the Flyers had won to even the series at one game apiece.
They showed a few select brawls on the scoreboard, particularly concentrating on those times in the past 41 years of Flyers history where they have pounded various Canadiens players to the ice, if not quite to a pulp.
They paraded out Ed Hospodar, Philadelphia hero of a famous pregame brawl between the Flyers and the Canadiens in 1987, and Hospodar brought the fans to their feet by rolling up his sleeves and doing a little shadow boxing.
They showed clips of what outside media - in this case Washington, home of the Capitals, the team the Flyers beat in seven games in Round 1 - had to say of Philadelphia's famously partisan fans and invited these fans to roundly boo any outside condemnation of their behaviour.
During the first brawl, caused by the Flyers' chippy Steve Downie pulling the feet from under Montreal goaltender Carey Price, they chanted "U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!" as if this were somehow America against the world instead of a hockey game being played by a wide variety of North Americans and Europeans.
Did it work?
You be the judge. The Montreal power play, vaunted all season long as the NHL standard, was simply embarrassing in the early going, managing but a single shot during a lengthy 5-on-3 advantage.
The Canadiens even allowed an unassisted short-handed goal when Mike Richards was allowed to scoop up a badly played puck, dart in and fire a shot through a screen that perhaps Price should have had.
As for Price, the story so far of the last Canadian team still standing, he wilted when it was most needed that he stand tall. The Flyers' third goal, a weak shot by R.J. Umberger, was one a beer-league goalie would have been expected to stop.
It was no surprise, then, that when the flagging Canadiens came out for the third period, Price was no longer in goal, replaced by backup Jaroslav Halak.
What was far more surprising was that, finally, after 40 minutes of playing as if they'd rather be in bed sick, the Canadiens got the crowd out of their system and back into the game.
They brought the score to 3-2 and were pressing right up until Montreal took hockey's stupidest penalty, for too many men on the ice.
It was over, the Philadelphia crowd had played its best, and only, game so far, and the question now was would Montreal of the third period show tomorrow night, or would it be the Canadiens of the first two.
Kelly, signing autographs in the lower concourse, put it best.
"If we don't give 60 minutes, we'll suffer."
Hard to say if he was talking on the ice or off.
Likely both.
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