Sabres' season summed up as disappointment
by MATT KRUEGER Reporter

Ottawa's Chris Neil trips as he passes Buffalo goaltender Ryan Miller during the second period of Saturday afternoon's Game Five of the Eastern Conference Finals. The Sabres lost 3-2 in overtime and were eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs. Photo by David F. Sherman

Even after setting franchise records in wins (53) and points (113), winning the Presidents' Trophy for the first time and advancing to the Eastern Conference finals for the third time in four seasons, the Buffalo Sabres will look back at the 2006-07 season as a shortcoming.

The season, which held the lofty expectation of winning the team's first Stanley Cup, ended prematurely Saturday with the Sabres' 4-3 loss to the Ottawa Senators in Game Five of the Eastern Conference finals. And the collective gasp from the 18,690 fans in HSBC Arena, the 10,000 fans standing in the plaza outside and every member of the team at seeing Daniel Alfredsson's game-winning goal in overtime preceded the sunken-head sigh.

The dream was over.

"It's frustrating, because I don't think the group of guys we have here (was) ready for the season to be over," said Tim Connolly, whose play in the series was amazing, considering he missed all but two games of the regular season with post-concussion symptoms. "We thought we had a good enough team to go all the way, but they just got out to that 3-0 lead on us (in the series), and it's tough to dig yourself out of that. The way we were playing, we could have. If we scored in overtime, who knows what would have happened. But it went the other way, and now it's all over."

From the beginning of the season, when the Sabres won their first 10 games, the expectations grew. The team that surprised so many teams last year by riding a wave of momentum into the playoffs and making it all the way to the Eastern Conference finals before losing to eventual Stanley Cup champion Carolina, suddenly found itself on the cup-or-bust highway.

Everywhere you went in Western New York, the Sabres' colors of blue and gold covered windows, cars, overpasses and the bodies of their fan base. Signs of "Go Sabres" and "One Team, One Goal" graced seemingly every building front from the Pennsylvania line to Lake Ontario.

This was the year Buffalo would finally celebrate a championship. But that's not how it works in sports. Heartbreak is inevitable.

"This one will take a while to sink in," said Jason Pominville, who struggled to hold back the tears in the locker room after the game. "I'll think about it for a little while, then look forward to next year. It's a tough thing to handle. We battled hard. We all pulled in the same direction, and we all meant well. It's disappointing to end this way."

Maybe the deepest pain the players and coaches feel this week is the sense that they let down the community that rallied behind the team. Buffalo sold out every home game during the regular season, even the ones during the dreadful October snowstorm that plunged the region into darkness for up to two weeks.

The fans also shelled out money to make the new jerseys the hottest commodity in hockey. At the end of the season, seven of the top 10 selling jerseys belonged to Sabres.

"Right now, that's one of the parts that hurts so much, how awesome they were everywhere we went in the city," co-captain Daniel Briere said. "Just thinking about it gives me goose bumps. It was something very special that we shared with the fans this year. I think it started building up last year, but it took another level this year that I didn't think was possible. Our fans were fantastic. That's one of the parts that hurts the most, the feeling that we let them down."

After Game Five, when the Sabres made their way back to the locker room to take off their uniforms one last time, the mood was as somber as a funeral. That's fitting, since the dreams died with an overtime tumbler that just missed the stick of goalie Ryan Miller.

"I think that there's a lot of disappointment right now," said coach Lindy Ruff, who is in the running to earn back-to-back NHL Coach of the Year awards.

"We asked them to put a lot of work in, and they put a lot of work in throughout the year," he said. "I think we had some struggles throughout the playoffs. Maybe part of it was that we had some guys coming off pretty tough injuries. Maybe we weren't quite as good as we needed to be. But at the same time, I think I'm going to stick with it. There's a lot to be proud of. Nobody wanted to lose, and there's going to be a grave feeling of letting everyone down, letting our fans down. The fans' support was absolutely tremendous, and the expectations were sky high. That room was as quiet as quiet could be."

No experience is a bad one if you learn something from it. And that's the message Chris Drury sent to his teammates after the season ended.

"I think, at some point, every team learns there are two different seasons," he said. "You have to do things in the postseason that Lindy calls out of character, things that you don't do as a team or as an individual during the year and get away with it. But you get this far and against a team like Ottawa, you're not going to get away with it not playing as hard as you can."

e-mail: mkrueger@beenews.com