VANCOUVER – Somewhere in between Panthers forward Nathan Horton requesting a trade and the Bruins’ coming parade, Mark Recchi laid out his plans for the 2010-11 season.

Recchi’s hope was a simple one: that teams would think about playing the Bruins and be terrified. 

“You want to get that reputation. That ‘[Jeez], we’ve got to go play them. No matter what, they’re going to work,’” Recchi said in Prague prior to the start of the season. “That’s important. If we can get that consistency, we’ll be a real tough team.”

If the Bruins’ two biggest games of the season – Game 7 against the Lightning and their Cup-clinching Game 7 Wednesday in Vancouver – proved anything, it’s that the B’s were one bear of a team to play against. They were resilient, they were tough and they were gutsy. 

With the Bruins, it all naturally begins with coaching and defense. Few thought Claude Julien was the man who would end the Bruins’ championship drought. His system would lead to playoff spots, but not the Stanley Cup. After the B’s were shut out by the Ducks in December, fans didn’t understand what the team was waiting for. Yet Julien stuck around, with that same defense-first approach and his rewards system. 

“I guess [criticism] was out there, but the most important thing is to stay the course,” Julien said of receiving success. “As I’ve said to everybody else, our players believed in what we were doing, and that’s the most important thing. When your players don’t believe, then you’ve got an issue. It didn’t really matter what was being said on the outside. Our guys in that dressing room knew exactly what we needed to do to win, and they were very supportive of that. That’s what you end up doing. Today you stand here and you say, ‘It worked and we were rewarded for it.“

Then there’s the way the Bruins’ forwards battled throughout the playoffs. Look at the first period of Wednesday’s contest. If the Bruins’ fourth line wasn’t going the way it was, the Bruins still would have had that first goal, but it’s unknown whether they would have a pulse. When the likes of Daniel Paille, Shawn Thornton and Gregory Campbell are outworking the best team in the league, maybe it’s a bad sign for the Canucks, but the grit from the energy line hardly came as a surprise. 

Of course, toughness doesn’t begin and end with a guy like Thornton. “Tough” is probably a word that will be used an awful lot by the Sedin twins this summer, as they had as tough a time out there as anybody in the finals. And it wasn’t because they disappeared on a big stage, it was because Chara and Dennis Seidenberg gave them little, if anything to work with.

The captain, much like the coach, has never had to worry aout getting too much praise in this town, but perhaps it’s time they got it. Chara’s second-period turnover and subsequent save on an Alexandre Burrows bid was a frightening play in the grand scheme of things, but his pairing factored heavily into both the Sedins’ disappearance and the Bruins’ victory. 

“It’s awesome. You jus see that if you stick to the system and you execute it well, it’s hard to beat that system,” Seidenberg said after the win. “It’s based on solid defense and were just really opportunistic up front.”

Even when the Sedins got their chance on the power play, the B’s once again shut them down. The brothers ended up combing for just three points over seven games.  

Throughout the playoffs, the Bruins proved to be a team that was very capable of bending, as they did in both the Eastern Conference quarterfinals vs. the Canadiens and Cup finals, but never breaking. The B’s dropped the first two games in each of those series but always found a way to see the series end in a celebration. The celebration after their third Game 7 was a bit more special, as they were celebrating their first Stanley Cup since 1972. 

Boston may remain in disbelief for a day or two, but the fact of the matter is that it was a Cup well-earned. This wasn’t a series of 16 flukes – it was a case of a team with Cup-contending team doing what it had to in order hoist the most coveted trophy in all of sports. They proved they were capable, and once again they executed straight to victory.

In the final game of his historic career, it turns out Recchi did not get his wish. Teams won’t look at the Bruins and think “tough to play against.” 

They'll think "Stanley Cup champions."