Bruins stun Flyers in overtime to take 2-0 lead

KIMMO TIMONEN did not need a replay to confirm what he already witnessed with his own eyes.

His heart sank the moment the puck snapped off David Krejci's stick, finding the top of the twine behind Brian Boucher before caroming off the back crossbar of the net and bouncing out to the faceoff circle.

The referee, standing just behind the net, signaled no-goal.

Play continued, though some fans with an intuition - or an angle the same as Timonen - already had begun to head for the exits.

Boston's bench already had emptied with exuberance, before being herded off the playing surface by a waving official.

Though a whistle had come to stop play just a few seconds later, it didn't take long for the horn to sound to signal the review at the NHL's War Room in Toronto already had seen enough. Krejci's shot was a winner - on the same net, at the same end of the ice, as Patrick Kane's Stanley Cup-clinching goal on June 9, 2010.

Philadelphia, apparently, is the home of invisible overtime goals.

Krejci gave Boston a 3-2 win 14:00 into overtime last night, as the Bruins took a commanding, two-game lead in the best-of-seven, Eastern Conference semifinals back to Boston.

Game 3 is tomorrow night at Boston's TD Garden.

For the first time since playing Boston last season in the same round, the Flyers face the very real possibility of getting swept - even though they outshot the Bruins, 32-12, from the start of the third period through overtime.

The Flyers fired a team-playoff-record 54 shots at Tim Thomas, and he stopped all but two of them, finishing the game with 46 saves in a row.

"Obviously we played really well," Timonen said. "I thought we were creating a lot of chances to score. But their goalie was pretty good today."

In case you forgot, the Bruins jumped to a three-game lead over the Flyers last season - though both of Boston's first two wins came at TD Garden. The Flyers are just 3-13 all-time in playoff series when trailing 2-0. Aside from last year, both of the other two series victories - with last year being the exception - came when dropping the first two games at home.

The Flyers' last lost the first two games at home and went on to win in 2000 against Pittsburgh in the Eastern Conference semifinals.

For further inspiration, though, the Flyers don't need to look far. The Bruins themselves extinguished Montreal in seven games last round after fumbling the first two games at home.

After the way last night started, when James van Riemsdyk brought the crowd to its feet when he one-timed a pass from Claude Giroux behind Thomas just 29 seconds into the contest, it was hard to imagine it would end with such silence.

Van Riemsdyk opened the scoring with the seventh-fastest playoff goal in franchise history. And he added to it a little more than 9 minutes later when he whacked in his own third rebound opportunity to give the Flyers a two-goal edge on the power play. It was their second power-play goal in as many games, even though Chris Pronger was not in the lineup to wreak havoc in front of Thomas.

"I think it was a great team effort, a great response game for us," van Riemsdyk said. "But unfortunately, it doesn't really mean much."

But just 3:19 later, Chris Kelly quickly tempered any expectations of a Flyers blowout when he knocked a rebound by a scrambling Brian Boucher, who was taken out of the play by a hit thrown by teammate Andrej Meszaros.

Exactly 1 minute and 25 seconds later, the lead was gone, as the once-rambunctious crowd was quieted to a whisper when Brad Marchand tucked a shot inside the near post to knot the game with 5:45 left in the first period.

"That's playoff hockey," Timonen said. "The lead is never safe. It doesn't matter if it is 2-0 or 3-0, no lead is safe."

And that's when the teams settled down into the tight-checking, back-and-forth, playoff-style game that many had predicted would play out - instead of the 7-3, Game 1 debacle that took place Saturday afternoon.

That was, until both teams had a chance to take the lead during prolonged stretches of play in the other's end.

Boston tried to take advantage when Boucher needed to briefly leave the game with 8:59 remaining in the second period because of an apparent hand or wrist injury. It was the fifth time in nine playoff games that the Flyers were required to make a goaltending change midgame, but no one could have seen this one coming.

Sergei Bobrovsky entered and was sensational, holding off a flurry that saw the Bruins end the middle frame with six consecutive shots on goal.

But when the Flyers returned to the ice for the third period, it was not Bobrovsky who was put in charge of keeping Boston at bay. It was Boucher, who returned just as the Flyers started to get hot.

In the third period, the Flyers set a franchise playoff record for shots on goal in a period at home by blasting 22 pucks at Thomas. They weren't able to solve him on a single one of them, which included a breakaway chance by Danny Briere and numerous two-on-one opportunities off the stick of van Riemsdyk.

"I had a lot of chances," van Riemsdyk admitted. "I'm probably not going to be able to sleep well tonight thinking about those. It's tough."

The Flyers outshot Boston, 22-7, in the third period to take the game's momentum with them into the locker room before overtime. Momentum, like seeds and home-ice advantage in the Stanley Cup playoffs, means little. The Flyers had hit the post twice in overtime alone before Krejci dug in the dagger.

"There's going to be games like that where a team gets the lucky breaks," Briere said. "But I really believe that if we play the same way, we'll get the results that we want."

The Flyers' franchise playoff record for shots on goal in a period at home was 20, broken in the third period by their 22. The overall record for shots on goal in a period is 28, accomplished in the first period of Game 3 in Pittsburgh during the 1997 Eastern Conference finals . . . The Flyers are 3-4 all-time when scoring a goal in the first 30 seconds of a playoff game.

For more news and analysis, read

Frank Seravalli's blog, Frequent Flyers, at

www.philly.com/FrequentFlyers. Follow him on Twitter at

http://twitter.com/DNFlyers.