Recent historical perspective tells us the Bruins can bounce back from their absolute clunker in Game 5 against the Flyers on Monday.

The last time the Bruins came out and laid an egg with the eyes of the NHL upon them was March 18 against the Penguins. That, of course, was the game where everyone associated with the team was looking for Boston to come out and deliver a message to Matt Cooke for his March 7 hit on Marc Savard — the hit that knocked the center out for the next two months with a Grade 2 concussion.

We know the story: Shawn Thornton threw down with Cooke less than two minutes into the game and … that was about it. The Bruins were shut out 3-0, and the fan base was disgusted.

Game 5 at TD Garden on Monday was similar. Call it is the Curse of Bobby Orr and 1970: Before the March 18 game, the 1970 Stanley Cup championship team was honored before the game. Monday, the team was honored again, as Orr had his statue of “The Goal” unveiled in front of the west entrance to TD Garden. Again, the Bruins went out and laid an egg.

After the March 18 games, the Bruins went on the road to Madison Square Garden and Tuukka Rask outdueled Henrik Lundqvist 2-1 to get back to winning ways. Steve Begin fought Brandon Prust while Miroslav Satan and Dennis Wideman provided the scoring. Then, the Bruins came home and shutout the Thrashers, a team hot on their heels in the chase for a playoff berth.

So Boston hopes something similar can happen on the road against the Flyers in Game 6 on Wednesday. At the same time, the Bruins will need to do more than just show up (which they never did on Monday) to finally put the clamps down on Philadelphia.

Foremost, the defense needs to get back to where it was earlier in the series. The top four defensemen were both stifling and offensive, controlling each blue line and getting the puck through the neutral zone with efficiency that belied the Flyers aggressive forecheck.

The last two games there has been nothing of the sort. The Bruins defensemen could not get out of their zone, took a total of two shots on net and crumpled while attempting to control the blue line. Simon Gagne can attest to that, as he was handed a goal by Wideman when the defenseman’s stick broke taking a back pass and Gagne thoroughly torched Wideman on the way to scoring the Flyers’ fourth goal.

“I think we just have to make better decisions with the puck,” coach Claude Julien said Tuesday. “The points were open at times and we just have to make better decisions.

“It has been an issue for us this year when you talk about our offense and we need our ‘D’s’ to be part of that offense and help out and activate our ‘D’ and encouraging them to go up the ice a lot more and so on and so forth.”

To be fair to Wideman — who the fans have pilloried as the symbol of everything that has gone wrong for the Bruins this year — he did not have a lot of choices. He could have caught Gagne and tackled him and took the chance of a penalty shot (probably the wisest thing) or slowed him down and tripped him and hope for a two-minute penalty.

“I didn’t really know what to do,” Wideman said Tuesday at the Bruins practice facility in Wilmington. “I looked over and saw Hunwick coming back, and I thought that if I could just make a stride and slow him up a little bit, then Hunwick would be able to catch him and not him have a clean breakaway.”

Boston may have muffed its chance to take advantage of Michael Leighton as well. The goaltender had not played a game since March 16 and had only been activated to the roster right before Game 4 in Philadelphia as the emergency backstop. (If the Bruins could have just put shots on net, especially from the blue lines, against Leighton, than this preview would be more about who the Bruins would rather face, the Canadiens or Penguins, in the conference finals.)

But Leighton got his warmup against the Bruins in what amounted to 14 practice shots in shutting down Boston through 35:29 of Game 5, and he should be at some semblance of full strength come puck drop at 8 p.m. at the Wachovia Center. Brian Boucher was decent for most of the series, but he was never what the Flyers had in mind when it came to playoff hockey.

Not that Leighton is historically any better — he had never played in an NHL playoff game until Monday night and is also a career backup. But his regular season numbers were considerably better than Boucher’s.

The Bruins still have an opportunity to benefit from Leighton’s injury — he did say Monday afternoon that the his high ankle sprain still bothers him. Boston should take every chance it can get to crash the net and test Leighton’s stability. Maybe the Bruins can get a couple lucky ones that way early and take the Broad Street faithful out of the game early. That would be ideal.

Goaltending on the other side will be key as well. Boston is looking for Rask to rebound after two soft games, and there is no reason to think that he should not. The only thing with Rask is that, if he gets overly frustrated, he may start to try and do too much. That is not his personality, but the calm exterior and sound mechanics between the pipes have an undercurrent of machismo that has gotten Rask in trouble in Providence and Finland during big games.

The Bruins staff believes that he has matured enormously this year, but his has his maturity extended to the point where he can really clamp down and take a tough playoff series? That remains to be seen.

If nothing else, look for the Boston to come out with vigor on Wednesday. Maybe a bona fide fight early in the game to get the juices going, even though real fights tend to be rare occurrences in the playoffs, for the obvious reason of not wanting to shorten your bench 8.3 percent of the game with a five-minute major. Either way, a thump off the drop would go a long way for the Bruins to reestablish some control and brush away the Flyers once and for all.