The puck stops ... for now

When it was over, when Tim Thomas abruptly and dejectedly skated from the net toward the Bruins bench, there was silence. The loudest Bruins season in recent memory was whittled to something less than a whisper. It was so quiet you could hear a Cup drop.

The old refrain, the one that has stuck in our heads like the Nutcracker Suite and includes those familiar words same old Bruins? Doesn't apply to this team.

"Overall, I think we’re improving,’’ Bruins defenseman and captain Zdeno Chara said last night following a gut-wrenching 3-2 overtime loss to the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. "It’s just a sad way to end it right now. Obviously, we had much different goals, higher goals, better expectations. It’s a tough one.’’

So the Bruins officially are out again, and for the 37th consecutive spring there will be no Stanley Cup celebration in Boston. Truth be told, we’ve endured droughts much longer than this one. Top seed or no top seed, the Bruins were outplayed in the second round by a Carolina team that has been among the league’s best since the beginning of March, a club that had the Bruins consistently and frantically skating around their own end as if preparing for a hurricane.

That’s the thing about the playoffs, be it in hockey, football, basketball, or baseball. The games are different. The slightest weaknesses are exposed and exploited. Seeding is one thing, reality is quite another. And no matter how much people would like to believe that the Bruins are on par with the Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings at this stage, the truth is that they are not.

Yet.

Said coach Claude Julien in the aftermath of last night’s loss: "This is what we need to learn that it’s going to take a lot more than what we accomplished this year.’’

The hurt? That goes away after a while. It almost always does. A year ago at this time, the Bruins were a team fortunate to secure the last seed in the playoffs, a collection of youngsters that improbably forced a seventh game against the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs. Game 6 still lives on. The Bruins still showed up for training camp as our Fourth Franchise and amid relatively modest outside expectations, then began carving their way through the regular season so methodically that we began to ask one of the most important questions in sports.

Are they for real?

Well, now we know. The Bruins are for real all right, and they should be real for some time. In many ways, next season will be the one that truly marks their growth, though we may not be able to assess that until next spring. The Bruins suddenly appear young and talented, well coached and well managed. They have good goaltending. They have size and skill. They have decisions to make, to be sure, but that should serve as further indication of just how far they have come. Bad teams don’t have difficult decisions to make because they don’t have enough good players to worry about. The Bruins do.

"Hopefully we’ll keep going in the right direction,’’ Julien said, "and not take any steps backwards.’’

As for this year, have no doubt that this was an enormous step forward. Bruins diehards have been waiting far too long already for another Stanley Cup, and Julien himself knows that championships require a combination of luck, talent, health and karma. In 2008-09, the Bruins seemed to have most of those. Yet to lump these Bruins in with those of 2003-04 would be terribly unjust and unfair.

Last night, scattered in front of their lockers following the defeat, the Bruins seemed utterly devastated, wholly unfulfilled. This can be a very good thing. One by one, from Chara and Marc Savard to Tim Thomas and Milan Lucic, the Bruins said the hurt prevented them from focusing on the positives of their season, from recognizing what they did to revive hockey here, from celebrating the renaissance that brought them one step closer to the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots.

Next year, the hurt should be what drives them.

"It’s not a great feeling at all. That’s pretty much it,’’ Lucic said when asked about the immediate impact of Carolina forward Scott Walker’s decisive goal. "It sucks the life out of you.’’

Indeed it does.

But then, for more than seven months, the Bruins breathed so much life back into Boston, too.