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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 once won two most-valuable-player awards bringing Stanley Cups to this city, 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 for the first two periods 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 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 — "I didn't like it," Philadelphia goaltender and Quebec native Martin Biron said at game's end. They 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 some other dimension courtesy of grainy film.
They dressed in orange, it seemed all 19,849 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 a Flyer to end the previous game in Montreal, which Philadelphia 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 1987 pregame brawl between the Flyers and the Canadiens, 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 a first-period scuffle brought on 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!" even though more than half the Flyers' team this night was made up of former Canadian world junior players.
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 scooped up a badly played puck, darted in and fired a shot through a screen that perhaps Price should have had.
As for Price, the story of the last Canadian team still standing, he wilted when he most needed to 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.
To say he was rattled by this crowd would be an understatement.
It was no surprise, then, that when the flagging Canadiens came out for the third period, Price was no longer in goal, but replaced by backup Jaroslav Halak.
What was far more surprising was that, finally, after 40 minutes of playing as if they'd rather be home in bed, the Canadiens got the crowd out of their system and got 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 up tomorrow night, or would it be the Canadiens of the first two periods?
Kelly, signing autographs in the lower concourse, put it best.
"If we don't give 60 minutes, we'll suffer."
It was hard to say if he was talking about the crowd or the team.
Probably both.
