It definitely hit me this morning. Sunday was chill since I was at seaworld for Father's day and completely shut off anything hockey related. I'm just hoping that Edmonton didn't flip some sort of switch on Saturday. Getting reverse swept would destroy us as fans and as a franchise
I still believe we will win the series. Yep, we made things worse for ourselves by being completely stomped on and giving the Oilers hope, but it's still just one game. And it's just really tough to win four straight games.
There was a good Hockey PDOCast on this yesterday - it's a neutral and analytics focused hockey podcast. They asked that question about whether they saw anything tactically from the Oilers in G4 that could change the trajectory of the series, and they basically said no. They also mentioned that the Panthers did have a tendancy from the regular season to get blown out at times as we play a really intensive style of hockey and tend to let up once we know we're losing. I don't know how true that is but it seems fair so I'm clinging onto that to explain that blowout!
My sense is that the Oilers are a better team than 3-0 would have indicated, were playing loose/pressure-free in G4, had better line combination and also took advantage of great matchups. We let our foot of the gas and collectively had probably the worse game of our post-season. And then we just effectively gave up once we felt the game was out of reach. But I feel we are still the better, deeper and healthier team over 7 game series, with the better goalie. And just as it's bloody hard for us to win four games straight, it would be even worse for the Oilers to do so.
But yes, still a nervous wreck...