Fifty-two seconds…that’s all it took for all the good vibes of Game 3 and the fans’ energy in the pregame to evaporate. Fifty-two lousy seconds for Carolina to dominate us on the first shift, for Dougie Hamilton to make a critical mistake with a failed clearance keeping him and Jonas Siegenthaler on the ice for a longer shift and for the Devils to never recover the puck until Andrei Svechnikov’s seeing eye shot was fished out of the net, stunning everyone with a quick 1-0 lead before you could sit down with your beer stick at the arena (not that I did this, but those things are cute I have to admit haha).

If any first shift ever set a tone for a game, it was that shift yesterday. Both in showing that Carolina was more ready to play yesterday than they were in Game 3, and in showing that we were again going to have a flat start, not exactly uncommon with this group but just more inexcusable under the circumstances. Sure, I had the fear that we’d run out of energy after that adrenaline-filled OT win the other night, but I didn’t expect the team to actually come out as if they were satisfied with winning one game in the series and shooting our load.

That apathy from both team and crowd carried over through the first period, with Jacob Markstrom giving up a clunker of a short-side goal to Jaccob Slavin following a brutal Stefan Noesen turnover, showing we weren’t going to get any help from ‘Marky’ either yesterday. From 1-20 on the roster, that first period was as poor an effort as anything the Devils showed us in a brutal second half but for the first time in a while, it was a bit disappointing coming just after a heroic effort on Friday. Getting a grand total of three shots in the first period is just not going to cut it, I don’t care if Carolina had Freddy Andersen in net or Freddy Krueger. By the time an ice-cold Svechnikov got his second of the game with a tip in on a power play (of course) early in the second period, I was actually planning an early exit. For all the world this looked like Game 4 two years ago where the Canes responded to a bleh effort 2-0 up by running us out of the building, while this Game 4 looked like a fitting coda for a disappointing team.

Of course the Devils being the Devils, it wasn’t bad enough just to lose – they had to throw in a big tease on top of it that only served to annoy me even more over the start of the game. Even as Nico Hischier scored his third goal of the series to cut the deficit to 3-1, I figured we would give up more goals anyway and be unlikely to score the 4 or more we’d need to win the game. Then came a sequence that could have turned the game if we had more of an offensive attack, a sequence that started when ironically Svechnikov made his one misstep of the game by pushing Timo Meier into Andersen, injuring his starting goaltender for the rest of the game at least.

While the refs enraged the building by calling a five-minute major on Timo, eventually the call was overturned upon review as Toronto did its job thankfully. Making all the supposed criticism of Timo not getting a penalty during the intermission even more annoying. I was at the game so I didn’t hear it but memo to the studio…a penalty was called and was overturned after video showed Timo didn’t initiate contact with Andersen. Perhaps he went a step too far into the crease before that, but it’s very rare these days to call goaltender interference unless the skater actually initiates contact, which didn’t happen here.

Anyhow, not only did the play take out Carolina’s starting goalie but also fired up Timo, who almost immediately scored on his next shift, albeit with his worst shot of the series, a turnaround wrister from the boards that somehow went in past Pyotr Kochetkov to cut the deficit to one, and end all my talk about leaving early to join my friends for an impromptu game night (planned after I’d already decided to take the train from South Orange to save money on the inflated parking prices at the arena).

At this point, we had the momentum and the crowd back. Unfortunately what we didn’t have…was the talent or the legs to keep the pressure on Carolina’s shaky young goaltender, who only had to make fourteen saves in just over thirty-five minutes, many of them not very hard shots at all. Still, the Devils were hanging by a thread in the game through the second and much of the third period…until Markstrom gave up his second clunker of the night, starting off his own turnover and ending with an unscreened trickler through him as he completed his hero to zero arc in two nights. Svechnikov sealing matters with a hat trick goal was a fitting coda to a disappointing game, if not the entire second half of the season.

On the plus side, at least I made it for the last hour of my friends’ game night, despite wasting an hour after the game waiting for the next train back to South Orange (I hadn’t really cared about that possibility when it didn’t seem like I was going anywhere else after the game anyway). From that standpoint at least the night wasn’t a total loss.

As far as the team goes, of course there’s still at least one more game to be played. And as much as I can’t stand Carolina and want to see us put one over on them, I know that’s not really going to happen at this point – even with how underwhelming they look, our problems on and off the ice are just so pronounced at this point part of me just feels like let’s just get put out of our misery here and not have to bother with going to another game Friday which will likely be another letdown even if they somehow find a way to win tomorrow in a building they’re 1-13 in their last fourteen playoff games.

While Friday’s game to quote my arena friend ‘was a nice reward for us fans for suffering through the difficult second half of the season’, yesterday’s game was a reminder of both just how difficult the second half was and how unlikely a revival is now without any of our three injured defensemen (or Jack Hughes) coming back anytime soon it would seem.