One by one, the Flyers took turns walking up to a pair of stepstools on either side of the locker room and tried to explain to the assembled media what had just happened.
Forgive them if they seemed a little dazed. It may have been the hits the Penguins were laying out, or maybe the fact they didn’t expect to be up 3-0 in the series against their cross-state rivals.
“Yeah if you would have told us that before the series, we would have probably laughed at you,” Danny Briere said. “But you know what, guys are working hard, playing as a team, we’ve got four lines rolling and Bryz playing solid, too.”
Briere and a few other Flyers still around from the 2010 Stanley Cup run remember what it was like to be in the Penguins’ skates. The Flyers were facing elimination after three games against the Boston Bruins and came all the way back to stun the hockey world.
“If there’s a team that can come back from 3-0 this year, I think it’s them,” Claude Giroux said of his Penguins opponents, “so we need to understand that. We need to make sure that we’re focused for Wednesday.”
The Flyers are looking for their first sweep of a playoff series since they took brooms to the New York Rangers in the 1995 Eastern Conference semifinals. This is just the 11th time in franchise history the Flyers have found themselves up 3-0 in a series. They’ve gone on to sweep six of them.
“Yeah, it’s nice, obviously, being up 3-0 but we know we still have a lot of work to do,” Brayden Schenn said. “The fourth win is always the toughest and they’re not going to roll over and die.”
