It worked so well in the regular season, so why not?
The opening act for the Flyers and Penguins was a comeback. Four times in the regular season the Flyers came back to notch points in the standings after going down 3-0. But surely they couldn't do it in the playoffs, right?
Wrong.
All the ingredients of the epic comeback were there: A Peter Laviolette timeout, big plays from rookies like Brayden Schenn, who had four crunching hits in his NHL playoff debut to go with a three-point night.
"We have to stop it," Briere said about falling behind. "I know we have to reverse it."
Briere turned it up once again in the playoffs. He is a point-per-game player with his two-goal performance. He had 98 points in 98 postseason games. He had both of the Flyers' first two goals, making it his sixth multi-goal game in the postseason.
He has 31 goals and 30 assists for 61 points in 58 playoff games for the Flyers, and moves past Rick Tocchet into eighth place in on the Flyers all-time playoff scoring list.
"At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I do if we don't win," Briere said. "If we don't win, I don't care."
Win, they did. Schenn scored a power play goal at 12:23 of the third period. It was the only man advantage the Flyers got. Laviolette claims not to believe in momentum within a game, but if he did, the Flyers would have owned all of it. It even carried over into overtime when Kris Letang misplayed a puck and Jakub Voracek was there to capitalize on the mistake, scoring an easy goal as his first NHL playoff goal.
"It's always hard to come down from 3-0, but we knew we could do it." Voracek said.
But did they really have to?
The Flyers said they didn't know what the reason was in the regular season that they fell behind early and apparently the playoffs are no different. Maybe it's the youth factor. The Flyers rolled six rookies into their lineup to start the playoffs and led the league in both games played by rookies and points by rookies in the regular season.
"It can work both ways," Letang claimed. "I think it can be good for them. They're just not that much pressure on those young guys and they're just going to play their best. We have young guys, too."
But the Flyers' youth group showed up much more. Schenn had the three-point night, Sean Couturier was tasked with keeping Evgeni Malkin quiet and held him to without a point and Matt Read had an assist on Voracek's game-winning goal.
So what if the Flyers could put a whole game together? That would alleviate some drama, but even they can" t fathom how good they'd be if they didn't keep falling behind.
"Nobody knows why," Voracek said. "But I can't imagine what it might be if we had a good start and play the right way for 60 minutes."
So once again, the Flyers live to speak about giving up an early lead and have another chance to come out strong. On Friday, they" ll face the Penguins again in Game 2 at CONSOL Energy Center.
Conventional wisdom says the Pens will come out of the gates hungry, ready to get revenge for choking on a three-goal lead in their own building. It will be up to the Flyers to see if they want to keep the same script, or fight back in the early going.
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