The Sens are down 3-0 to the Montreal Canadiens and have to win on Wednesday to forestall the end of their remarkable season.Jana Chytilova/Freestyle Photo/Getty Images
At this point, NHL dressing rooms start sounding like combinations of positive-thinking seminars and 12-step programs.
Focus on the now, worry only about what you can control and, above all else, banish negative thoughts.
"You have to build off the positives," Ottawa Senators rookie Curtis Lazar said.
The playoffs are an all-you-can-eat cliché buffet.
The last time the Senators faced elimination from the Stanley Cup playoffs, in 2013, then-captain Daniel Alfredsson was candid when asked if his team could overcome a 1-3 series deficit against Pittsburgh.
"Probably not," he said.
A rather large deal was made about the comment, although Alfredsson's only sin was to state a fact-based truth.
The hockey world evidently hasn't embraced the teachings of the Stoic philosophers, who believed the best method of confronting uncertainty is to visualize the worst-case scenario and embrace the gloom.
No, the firm belief in hockey is that denying the negatives will see you through, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. And while Alfredsson ended up being right, no one likes a downer.
But if you looked hard enough Tuesday, it was possible to find signs of Stoic-lite thinking among the Senators. Slumping winger Bobby Ryan, when asked about the team's predicament, said "I'm not comfortable with it, but we're prepared for it."
Ryan is ordinarily a positive-thinking sort – earlier in the series he said the solution to improving his play is "positive reinforcement. Just go out and create a feeling for yourself, do something on every shift to feel good."
It hasn't worked yet, but as Ryan said Tuesday, "nobody cares what happened [before] if you score a big goal."
The Senators will need a few of those.
If the situation looked bad in 2013, it's worse now. The Sens are down 3-0 to the Montreal Canadiens and have to win on Wednesday to forestall the end of their remarkable season.
Only four teams in NHL history have won a series after trailing 3-0; the probabilities of the Senators pulling it off stand at about 1.7 per cent.
Ottawa's players will point out they beat similarly dire odds just to make the playoffs. They also point out that two of those four historic NHL comebacks have happened in the past five years (2010 Philadelphia Flyers and the 2014 Los Angeles Kings).
Even the slimmest of chances is a hook on which to hang your hopes.
"The series is a lot closer than it's been indicated – we can't really go out there and get away from our game plan; we have to keep on plugging away," Lazar said. "Like the season: We hit a wall there and we broke through it and we managed to get into the playoffs. It's the same thing here."
There might be parallels to be drawn between the 2015 Senators and the 2010 Flyers and the 2014 Kings (each team was led by a stud defenceman, each had lost close games en route to falling behind 3-0).
But the Flyers and Kings weren't facing opponents who had played in conference finals the previous season. And they weren't facing Carey Price, the Habs goalie who has stopped 62 of the last 65 shots directed his way – and who hasn't lost four straight starts since January of 2014.
On the plus side, the Senators have scored six goals against Price despite not playing their best hockey.
Coach Dave Cameron repeated a familiar injunction: "You can't talk about coming back until you win one game."
The good news is Ottawa will have a chance to do it on home ice in front of adoring and noisy fans. And it would be a wonderful story if the Senators were able to clamber back into the series.
Cameron said he hasn't made up his mind on who will earn the start in goal, but all indications are that the rookie goalie who got the Sens to this point, Andrew Hammond, will sit in favour of Craig Anderson, who made 49 saves in Game 3.
A sweep would be a cruel result given Ottawa's play in the series – the Sens have led in each game, and carried the play for long swaths.
Unfortunately Ottawa fans, reality doesn't root for the underdog.