from Pierre LeBrun of ESPN,

Inside what is always a somber dressing room when the clock strikes midnight on a team’s season, GM Dean Lombardi grabbed Jarret Stoll and hugged him tightly.

Not sure what he told him in his right ear, but I suspect it would be along the lines that Stoll, like the rest of his teammates, left it all on the ice Saturday night in a gutsy performance by the banged-up Los Angeles Kings.

After their 4-3 double-overtime loss to the Blackhawks, the champs are out, but they went down swinging.

"To be quite frank, this one hurt," said veteran Kings blueliner Rob Scuderi, one of those championship warriors. "I though we outplayed them tonight. They had an unbelievable start, nobody can deny that, but for the rest of the night we gave ourselves a chance to win even with, I’ll call it adversity, that we kind of had to face tonight. But we’re a strong group, we played hard, played for each other and gave ourselves a chance. In the end, it wasn’t meant to be."

Lombardi was too emotional to size up his team’s season when approached by ESPN.com, but he did mention that he felt even in this incredibly hard-to-digest defeat, his team might actually learn as much if not more from this year’s playoffs than from winning it all last season.

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