from Tara Sullivan of the Boston Globe,

Brad Marchand had just turned TD Garden into an open-air party, a shorthanded and much-needed late second-period goal matching the one the Panthers had scored about 10 minutes earlier. With that, the Bruins were back in the game. As if following the script this team has written all season, Marchand did his part to erase some early jitters and sloppy play, putting his team on the launching pad and poised to explode to another winning finish.

I mean, that’s what the Bruins have done all year, right?

The fans were certainly feeling it. Already up 1-0 in this first-round series playoff against the Panthers, they came alive, barely able to contain their glee, or their confidence. Waving their yellow towels with abandon, belting out their a cappella version of Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer” with gusto, they were living it up.

And then they weren’t.

Not two minutes later, amid the last joyous syllable of the song’s chorus, the Panthers scored again. And while Eric Staal’s wrister turned the TD volume off just as decidedly as Marchand’s goal had turned it up, what followed after that was even worse. The Bruins couldn’t turn it up again, going straight downhill instead, briefly tying the score one more time but ultimately landing on the wrong end of a 6-3 final score, on the losing end of a game marred by too many fights, too many mistakes, too many turnovers and too many penalties to allow any chance of recovery.

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The NHL playoffs, you cruel and unpredictable beast, returning once again to remind any team at any time just how different the postseason is from the regular season, with the intensity infused in every shift, the stakes that ride on every pass, and the price that is paid for every mistake.

“They were a little hungrier than us,” defenseman Hampus Lindholm admitted.

“That’s it, that’s playoff hockey,” defenseman Charlie McAvoy said. “This whole thing is a roller coaster.

“There’s ups and downs in every series, that’s a playoff series. We have to turn the page and we know we got to be better … We still haven’t played our best hockey.”

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