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MONTREAL — It has been all about the goaltender.
Since he arrived here and played so well, they couldn't send him down, since the town got a feel for his technical brilliance and his nearly mystical calm. Since they prematurely began comparing him to Ken Dryden and Patrick Roy, since the midseason crisis of confidence that left him in tears and earned him a ticket back to Hamilton.
Since he righted himself, since Bob Gainey made the job his alone, rolling the dice by trading away his insurance policy, since they made the storybook run to first place, since that topsy-turvy opening-round playoff series against Boston capped by a brilliant seventh-game shutout on the night the city went a little bit crazy – or at least a few people did.
And now it will be all about Carey Price as postmortems are performed on the Canadiens of 2007-08, on the endless finger-pointing talk shows, all summer long, through next year, really until he does, or doesn't, bring them the Stanley Cup.
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No, that's not fair, except that this is love and war and hockey in Montreal. Price wasn't the only reason they won't be raising a 25th banner this spring, but he's one of them – and he's also the No.1 reason to hope that such a day might not be so far off.
When they finally opened the dressing room doors on Saturday, a long time after the Canadiens had lost 6-4 to the Philadelphia Flyers, losing a playoff series in five games that most felt they'd win comfortably, there were only two players waiting to tell the sad tale: the captain, Saku Koivu, because that's his job, and the 20-year-old goalie, still wearing his pads, because that's become his job, too.
Price's final game of the season was his playoffs in microcosm.
In the first period, with no score and the Canadiens on a power play, he stopped Mike Richards on a breakaway with one of those lighting-quick, perfect flicks of the leg that, when he's right, are his stylistic trademark. Just the emotional lift needed for a team mired in self-doubt: The Habs scored before the power play was done to take the lead for the first time in the series, except the overtime win in the first game.
Then in the third period, with the score tied 4-4, it was Daniel Brière in all alone – yep, that's how the Canadiens were playing defensively – and Price stopped him cold as well.
In between, he gave up two softies as the Flyers roared back from a 3-1 second-period disadvantage to grab a 4-3 lead, the kind that forced coach Guy Carbonneau into the desperate, no-win gambit of benching his franchise goaltender in the fourth game. And in the dying minutes of the third, Price couldn't bar the door – though the eventual winning goal was one of those tipped, fluky, seeing-eye ones that were Philly's stock-in-trade throughout the series.
“It feels like I've been playing for two years straight,” Price said afterward, sounding about as world-weary as a 20-year-old could, reflecting on a stretch that's included a final junior season, a world junior championship and a long playoff run and Calder Cup victory with the Bulldogs, followed by his first big-league season and first NHL postseason. “I'm not going to look at my equipment for three months. I'm not going to be on the ice for a while.”
In the end, perhaps in part because of fatigue, in part because of flagging confidence and in part because he's just a kid, he wasn't good enough to steal the Cup the way Dryden did once or the way Roy did twice (though check out the rosters of those teams, tally up the Hall of Famers and compare them honestly with this year's group). The truth is that, in falling short, Price also had plenty of company: In 12 playoff games against the bottom-seeded teams in the East, the Habs were definitively the better team on the ice, at most, three times. Against the Flyers, they were outworked, outmuscled in their own end, outsmarted, outchanced and outlucked – and then you get to the goaltending.
But that's a complicated business, sifting through all of those others who weren't quite the hero and weren't quite the goat. Plus, everyone knows the future's standing right here, speaking barely above a whisper.
Price was asked what he had learned from this first playoff, and he said the familiar stuff about how it's a different game, how much tougher it is to win. He also learned about that empty, air-out-of-the-balloon feeling, when in a hockey-mad town lifted by crazy high hopes, there's suddenly no reason to show up for practice tomorrow.
“When it ends, it ends in a hurry,” he said. “I just wish I could have played better.”
