Boston fans should consider themselves lucky this time of year. They have had their beloved Celtics in the NBA finals to focus on and, like many in the country, easily could ignore the Stanley Cup finals.

If they did watch as the Blackhawks captured the Cup, however, they would have seen that this series proved something unfortunately clear to them. It proved that the team that upended the Bruins in humiliating fashion was not a team of destiny. It was just a team with a mediocre goaltender that got outplayed by a better club.

Talk about anticlimactic. As much embarrassment as the blown 3-0 series and Game 7 leads came with, there were two ways of looking at it, much like with the 2004 American League Championship Series. Just as disgusted Yankees fans deemed it a choke job, baseball fans everywhere else viewed it as a historic comeback by a team that was meant to win it all.

Given that the Flyers had just the eighth-seeded Canadiens to deal with en route to the finals, it seemed very possible to tortured Bruins fans that this Philadelphia squad could become the 12th (!) team since the Bruins last won in 1972 to defeat Boston in the playoffs and win the Stanley Cup.

The setting seemed too perfect for the prophecy not to be fulfilled. Game 6 at the Wachovia Center after winning their previous two played at home in the series. A comeback mounted late in the third. It seemed like fate. Again.

But it was over a little more than four minutes later, and that’s when the excitement of the Blackhawks’ celebration was accompanied by an unsettling feeling for hockey fans.

Sure, an overtime ending to the finals looks good on paper, but the series-clinching play was so awkward that it’s hard to believe many outside the 312 area code were jumping up and down as Patrick Kane celebrated his goal-light-less goal that clinched the series. But that’s how it ended for the team that made it appear as though there was nothing it couldn’t conquer.

The Blackhawks were a better team than the Bruins, and had Claude Julien’s Bruins won one of Games 4-7 vs. the Flyers and then taken care of Montreal, they would have had their hands full with Chicago just as much as Peter Laviolette’s club did. But that doesn’t explain why Bruins fans should be feeling bad all over again after the team that made their club look bad a month ago looked very human when it mattered most.

After all, the “fate” card can’t be played anymore. Not for the Flyers, nor against the Bruins. Michael Leighton, who aside from an off night in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals gave up just two goals in Philadelphia’s four wins against Montreal, was back to being a subpar goalie who one would expect to be pulled against a good Chicago team. He was yanked in the second period of Game 1 of the finals and again following the first period of Game 5.

The competitiveness of the series was good enough to tease anyone pulling for Philadelphia. Game 5 was the only game in the series that the Flyers lost by more than one goal, and given that Chicago hadn’t proven capable of winning in Philadelphia and the Flyers had the same struggles in Chicago, it seemed a safe bet that the home team would win and send it to a Game 7.

Had that been the case, the game would have drawn comparisons to the great 2003 postseason, when the No. 7 seed Mighty Ducks met the No. 2 seed Devils (one of the aforementioned teams to beat the Bruins and win a Cup). Instead, the Flyers looked like nothing more than an overachieving 7 seed in over their heads against a better team from the Western Conference.

Turns out that’s all they were.