Matt Carle

BUFFALO - Matt Carle shrugged. With his locker stall deep inside Buffalo's HSBC Arena mashed in between that of Kimmo Timonen, Andrej Meszaros and Braydon Coburn, Carle may have been a little bit embarrassed. After all, Meszaros and the always-steady Timonen have largely been the players credited with keeping the Flyers' ship afloat without Chris Pronger for the past 19 games. The statistics - and we're not talking about the goals and assists - have painted a different picture.

BUFFALO - They call it new life, the playoffs, but the truth is that you can and often do take your past with you. You take your special-team troubles with you, take how you're feeling with the puck on your stick and off it. Sometimes you shake it off in time to make that new life rewarding, sometimes you die a thousand familiar deaths making the same mistakes that haunted you down the stretch. Sometimes you get a little lucky. Sometimes you don't. Jeff Carter skated into last night's game the latest entry of the what's wrong with the Flyers handbook.

Score: Sabres 1, Flyers 0 How it happened: Patrick Kaleta scored the goal and Ryan Miller stopped 35 Flyers' shots. Key play: The goal came when Kaleta maneuvered himself between Flyers defensemen Danny Syvret and Matt Carle to slam home a rebound past Sergei Bobrovsky. Heroes: Miller would have been our first star. James van Riemsdyk, who was the official first star, was the best player on the ice for the Flyers. Goats: Hard to pick one player, so let's target the Flyers power-play unit, which failed to score in five chances and 9 minutes, 22 seconds with the advantage.

ASIDE FROM smearing opposing forwards, one of the things Andrej Meszaros likes to do most is travel. His general practice after hockey seasons recently has been to go back to his native Slovakia for a spell before heading out to sightsee. He has hit most of the biggies in Europe, including a several-hour wait to see the Mona Lisa. So when Meszaros was acquired by the Flyers last summer, checking out the Liberty Bell had to go immediately to the top of his itinerary, right?

Flyers captain Mike Richards and general manager Paul Holmgren addressed the players earlier this week, trying to get the enigmatic team to play with more passion as the regular season heads toward an end. "It's always good when you hash things out," injured defenseman Chris Pronger said Thursday at the Flyers' practice facility in Voorhees. "It's always good to talk about what needs to be done. But talk is cheap. We have to go prove it on the ice. " Center Danny Briere, who plans to return to the lineup Friday in Buffalo after missing two games because of a groin injury, had similar sentiments.

TORONTO - With a horde of Canadian media surrounding him, poking and prodding for answers about the Flyers' struggles over the past 2 weeks, Chris Pronger smiled. "A little adversity never hurt anyone," Pronger said. The panic alarms going off in Philadelphia during the Flyers' four-game losing streak last week were heard loud and clear in Toronto - where the Maple Leafs are on track to miss the postseason for a sixth straight year. The sun is once again shining in the Flyers' world, which is officially back on its axis.

TORONTO - After the Flyers ended a four-game losing streak with an uneven 4-1 win over lowly Edmonton on Tuesday, defenseman Matt Carle compared his team's plight to the sport Arnold Palmer helped make famous. "I think the whole season is a work in progress," Carle said. "It's kind of like a golf game. You never are going to be perfect. There is always some aspect of the game that you want to try to work on. " In their previous four games, the Flyers went double-bogey (loss to Ottawa, the East's worst team)

Practice? We're talking about practice?   Not for the Flyers. They were sick, and tired . . . of losing. So, on Monday, they did not practice. Last night, recovered flu victims and offensive pillars Danny Briere and Jeff Carter combined for the first three goals to pace the Flyers to a impressive, if imperfect, 4-1 win over visiting Edmonton. It worked out so well that they are not practicing again today. Or, maybe, ever. The Flyers will jet to Toronto today but they will not work out. So far, it's a winning formula.

NEW YORK - Like one of the movies nominated for an Oscar, the Flyers' 4-2 win over the New York Rangers Sunday afternoon could have been called True Grit . Their goalie, Brian Boucher, was knocked woozy and lost the feeling in his right arm and hand when he collided with teammate Kimmo Timonen early in the third period, but he remained in the game and made some key saves down the stretch. Their exhausted defense, depleted because a left leg injury to Sean O'Donnell caused them to play almost the entire game with just five blue-liners, withstood a furious third-period attack and ran the team's record to 4-0 against New York this season.