I... well... wow.Top line scoring, secondary scoring, unquestionably the best power play effort since... well, I can't remember. Unquestionably the best sustained effort in a long, long time.
Out of respect of the effort and result, I am suspending the Futility Meter for today.
I think part of the result comes from the fact that Carolina rolled into town expecting an easy two points -- the track record of the team this year would lead them to assume nothing less. However even when the Senators were at the top of their game, they'd roll into one of the bottom-ranked teams expecting an easy two points and get their heads handed to them. If you relax too much and the other team gets a jump, you lose the momentum. It's happened to better teams before, and will happen again.
Tonight will be a better test of where this team really is at. The Senators have been playing leap-frog with Atlanta in the standings for a while now, so we will have to see if the team can give another sustained effort against a team with similarly low expectations.
It doesn't change the fact that we need a rebuild. Trying to grasp the playoffs, and then getting driven out in the first round does nothing for us but sustain the mediocrity -- Toronto being a case study in how limping around the midfield can turn into a perpetual motion machine. The Senators successes of the previous years has been built on draft picks we got during the awful first few years before then.
The route to the top goes through the bottom, and unfortunately we are not there yet.
