Dealing With Defeat

            Okay Boston, everybody take a deep breath. Inhale first; make sure that all of today’s fresh air fills up your lungs to replace the pain of last night. Then exhale the anger away and drink some Gatorade to help with the hangover.

            Alright, so you probably don’t feel much better. You probably still feel cheated by  the same Bruins team that brought you such great joy 369 days ago. You want to forget that the Washington Captials ended your Bruins season in Boston. Many of you want to wake up thinking that the final score was just the outcome of a nightmare. 

            It makes sense why you want nothing more than to call Felger and Mazz and vent. You want somebody to blame for your defeat, and there are a few candidates for your anger.

Curse Joel Ward for driving the dagger into the heart of your title hopes. Curse the Bruins power play for being worse than it was last year. Curse Tim Thomas for only being great instead of godly. Curse Milan Lucic and Patrice Bergeron for not having a goal between them the entire series.

            It is okay to hate the Capitals for ending your season, just respect how Joel Ward and his teammates delivered when it mattered most.

The Capitals came into this series as the underdogs and they pulled off an upset that will earn a spot on ESPN Classic. Ward only scored six goals in the entire season before putting the goal of his life in the back of the net. For the first time in NHL history, every game was decided by one goal. It sucks when someone has to lose a series this great.

In the end the better team won, as it always does.

There is nothing that the Bruins have to be ashamed of. At no point did the puck trickle through Buckner’s legs. This loss is not a ‘Brady threw the ball over the wrong shoulder or Welker dropped a ball in his hands’ debate. Both teams made plenty of mistakes throughout the series, it is just the Capitals were able to execute better at the game’s tipping point.

It is quite possible that Nathan Horton and a healthy Patrice Bergeron would have made for an entirely different series. It would have been nice if the Bruins could have been 3-23 with a man advantage this series instead of 2-23. However, those are excuses for the bitter.

Oddly enough, similar pain offers perspective. As much as it hurts, there is no way that this loss even comes close to the most painful in Boston sports history.

Bucky bleeping Dent hurt more feelings then than the Capitals did last night. Aaron Boone sending the Yankees to the World Series in 2003 was worse than Joel Ward sending the Caps to the second round. If The Giants ending the Patriots run at perfection blew a hole in the hearts of New England then the Bruins loss last night was a paper cut by comparison.

            So before you make plans to throw themselves off the top of Blue Hills, replay your own misery on TiVo, or say something incredibly stupid via Twitter, remember that the players on both sides of the result are human too.

            But that very often is forgotten after a tough loss. Sadly, somebody is going to be turned into a scapegoat to spare the rest of the franchise the wrath of the defeated.

            And that is the worst part of all sports.