There are some songs that are almost too cliché. They’re on every iPod, but they are generally only saved for sing-alongs or tired messages. 

Well, if the 2010-11 Bruins, the team that is closer to a Stanley Cup than in a long time, do have a song, it’s a cliché one. Think perhaps the most cliché song of all. 

When the Bruins were in Lake Placid between Games 3 and 4 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals vs. the Canadiens, there was an obvious source of inspiration. At the sight of the 1980 Miracle on Ice, the B’s could simply look around at their surroundings and know that there was nothing they couldn’t accomplish. 

Trailing in the series, 2-1, the B’s could have used inspiration. They had an uphill climb ahead of them as they tried to prevent an upset at the hands of the Habs, and they certainly were bombarded with questions about how Lake Placid inspired them. Maybe it didn’t inspire them at all, but if there was one moment that epitomized the Bruins’ drive to stick with it, it didn’t come within the walls of Whiteface Lake Placid Olympic Facilities Center. 

On April 19, the day after the Bruins notched their first win of the series, the B's regulars did not skate in Lake Placid. Instead, the black aces took to the ice, while the Bruins were given a day of well-deserved rest. That also meant rest for three reporters, and it was while having dinner at Wise Guy’s, one of the few open restaurants, that an easy story — and one the city of Boston can get behind — emerged from a jukebox. 

As the writers were eating, a group of Bruins strolled into the restaurant to have dinner and watch Game 4 of the Western Conference quarterfinal series between the top-seeded Canucks and eighth-seeded Blackhawks. As the players ate and watched the game, Bruins center David Krejci strolled over to the jukebox, inserted his money, and nodded his head with a grin. The sounds that would emerge from the speakers in the restaurant were cliché as they come, but for a team trailing in a series and hoping to make a longer postseason run, they were appropriate. 

The detuned piano. The effortless high wails of Steve Perry. It was Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” and it was fitting. 

The reason he was grinning? It wasn’t because he was trying to inspire his teammates or to start a Boston-wide obsession with the song a la 2004. It was because he messed up. 

“It was an accident,” Krejci admitted Friday. “I was trying to pick a song, and I was going through the songs and accidentally I pressed on Journey and it just started playing. I was just going through the songs to see what was up there, and I pressed it and immediately it started playing. And there was no more credits.”

Reminded of the song’s significance in the city during the Red Sox’ 86-year-drought-ending run in 2004, Krejci stopped for a minute and changed his tune. 

“Yeah,” he said with a laugh. “That’s why I chose the song.”

The Bruins would go on to play the next game of the series like Perry was following them throughout their every shift. The B’s fell behind 8:13 into the first period thanks to a Mike Cammalleri goal, making the Bell Centre crowd go into a frenzy. The B’s would tie it in the second period thanks to Michael Ryder’s first goal of the playoffs, but the Habs looked like a team ready to make it a 3-1 series when goals from Cammalleri and Andrei Kostitsyn made it a 3-1 game. 

The B’s would erase that deficit as well. Andrew Ference scored his biggest goal to ever be followed by a middle finger, while Patrice Bergeron tied it up with less than three minutes to go in the period. After P.K. Subban made it 4-3 early in the third,  Chris Kelly tied it up, and heroics from Ryder just 1:59 into overtime capped a triumphant Bruins win in which they came back from three deficits. 

The Bruins are sitting pretty right now as they prepare to begin the conference finals with the Lightning on Saturday, but had the Bruins not persevered in Game 4 vs. the Canadiens, they could have be looking at a 3-1 series deficit and would have faced a pretty big chance of being eliminated in the first round. 

Krejci knows the message behind the song — “We all know what it’s about,” he said. “We all know the words” — but any success that followed the playing of it is more on the Bruins than the jukebox. But still. 

“If you’re asking if I talked to the guys after we were down [in Game 4] in the dressing room and said, ‘I played a Journey song,’ then no,” he said with a smile. 

Maybe it’s a stretch to give one song too much credit, but it’s a song that showed the B’s were not ready to die. They had known too much postseason heartbreak already — especially Krejci, who went down with a broken wrist in Game 3 of the conference semifinals last year and saw his team blow a 3-0 series lead to the Flyers. 

But every team needs something to claim as its own. The Bruins have their jacket, but that night they had their song. Since they played the song, the Bruins are 7-2, including two series wins. 

If the Bruins go on to win this thing — the whole thing — this can be a story they tell their kids and their future teammates for years to come. It was the only song they played, but it was a song that started something big. And it all started in a small-town restaurant. 

"You know what? I like that song," Krejci said. "Sometimes we play it in the room. I really like the beginning, but then it keeps going and it's kind of the same thing. I like the first 30 seconds, maybe minute. It was an accident that it happened, but I enjoyed it."

If the Bruins can keep it up, Bostonians will enjoy it even more.