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MONTREAL — At the end of an emotional hockey spring in Montreal, perspective kicked in remarkably fast, at least for most.
With a little over three minutes left in the game, after the Philadelphia Flyers scored the go-ahead goal and it became clear that the Montreal Canadiens' fairytale season was drawing its final breaths, the Bell Centre went dead quiet.
More than a few fans started streaming to the exits. But the rest stayed, and once they regained their bearing, stood and cheered and waved their towels and sang one more chorus of "Ole, Ole, Ole" — a tough thing to do but the right thing to do on a night like this, after a year like this.
On the face of it, the finale was disappointing. The Habs' playoff run ended five games into the second round with a 6-4 loss to Philly after they had finished the regular season atop the Eastern Conference.
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And the truth is that in a dozen playoff games against Boston and the Flyers, two of the bottom playoff seeds on their side of the draw, Montreal were the dominant team on only two or three occasions — the last the glorious Game 7 win over the Bruins, which inspired both a victory party, and unfortunately a mini, opportunistic riot.
As it turned out, the people who turned that night into a faux Stanley Cup parade knew what they were doing, since the local heroes weren't going to get any closer to a championship this time around.
Against the Flyers, they were outworked, outmuscled in their own end, out goaltended to a significant degree, and outlucked.
"I believe in kharma sometimes," Montreal coach Guy Carbonneau said afterwards. "You have to be lucky to win the Stanley Cup. You need a good team, you need good players, but you also need those breaks on your side. The way they played against us — well, hopefully they have some left."
But those final cheers, those final songs, suggested that in a city famous for accepting nothing less than absolute excellence, they were more than willing to accept a moral victory now.
Last season, the Habs failed to make the playoffs. This season, the most optimistic figured they'd be life and death to qualify for the postseason. The organization went with young players, and handed over the keys to 20-year-old goalie Carey Price. He overachieved, they overachieved, expectations got a little out of whack, but in terms of the greater gameplan, there was nothing but good news.
"That's what I talked to [players] about after the game a little bit," Carbonneau said. "As a player, as a coach, you're frustrated because you lost. But I also realize we've come a long way in one season. I said in the beginning that we had a team to make the playoffs, and we did. Now we have to go from being a team that makes the playoffs into a team that's a contender."
Coaches, general managers, players, when offering the traditional post mortems, almost always say that, always see a flicker of light off in the distance.
Even the most cynical, the most heartbroken, will see that here by the time the dust settles, and with good reason. Then they'll start counting down to the fall.
