Simon Gagne was a rookie that year and Craig Berube a veteran player. Berube is now an assistant coach and Gagne is the vet. Both said yesterday it is as difficult as it is being made out to be, but both remember it being done.
"It's hard," Berube said before last night's game, which put the Flyers in a 3-1 series hole. "It's very hard. It's an uphill battle playing a real good team like Pittsburgh that's real competitive. They're not only talented but [Sidney] Crosby and [Evgeni] Malkin and [Sergei] Gonchar, they're competitive guys, [Marc-Andre] Fleury, all of them. They play hard. I'm impressed. It's not an easy test, for sure.
"But our guys, our leaders, they're positive, they believe they can win it. That's just their mentality. It's the same as 2000. We had a lot of good leaders and good veterans and we believed we could win."
According to the way Berube remembers the series, it was not the losses at home that got talked about going out to Pittsburgh for Games 3 and 4, it was the brawl at the end of the second game.
"We actually still thought we could win even though everyone was all depressed," he said. "We were actually mad. Remember, we brawled after that [Game 2] here.
"The reason that happened was because [Rick] Tocchet was mad at that [Tyler Wright] for something he did on the ice. So we all went out there and had a little melee.
"All the focus went on that. We were all a bunch of goons and dummies for doing that. So it wasn't really on the game itself. So we went into Pittsburgh and ended up winning a close game and got back in it."
Game 4 was the historic, five-overtime game that was won by Keith Primeau with a shot coming off the wing. Pittsburgh was never the same and the series swung on that win.
