Today's Mandatory Hockey Post

Unbelievable.  Un-frickin'-believable.  This:

It wasn’t just that the Bruins lost. It was the manner, texture and indescribably painful way they went crashing into hockey infamy.

Just as they led the series by three games to none, the B’s built a 3-0 lead in Game 7 with a roaring TD Garden behind them and various local sporting B’s — Bucyk, Bourque, Belichick — part of the mob. The Flyers took two dumb early penalties, the hometown heroes scored on both and it seemed like Philly’s attempt to become the third team in history (1942 Leafs, 1975 Islanders) to fight back from the worst deficit possible in a best-of-seven series had finally hit a wall.

[...]

Then, remarkably, one of the worst pieces of Bruin playoff history repeated itself. Just as Don Cherry’s ’79 squad blew a chance to eliminate the Montreal Canadiens in the NHL semifinals by taking a late game too-many-men penalty, so too did Claude Julien’s club get caught in exactly the same way.

Lucic was going off, Vladimir Sobotka was coming on and the officiating team led by referees Stephen Walkom and Kelly Sutherland ruled it was done too sloppily for their liking and called a penalty with 9:50 to play in the third.

The rest, as they say, is history.  Simon Gagne scored on the only shot in the resulting Flyers powerplay and Philadelphia skated off to join the '42 Leafs and the '75 Islanders in the hockey record book.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.  I suppose the same can be said for the hockey press, as well, because the entire hockey world is writing about nothing else today.  It was a stunning collapse on the part of the Bruins and an equally stunning, improbable, and heroic comeback by Philadelphia.  History was made yet again in these 2010 playoffs.

So, the conference finals begin tomorrow.  I'm not gonna go on at length right now, but here's how I think it'll shake out:  Sharks in six; Habs in seven (or less).