That should about do it for playoff talk

With just one win in four games of their five-game road trip, the revived dream of the postseason is all but dead.

The Buffalo Sabres play since essentially the start of the new year has been encouraging at the least, inspiring at the most, but in the end the result will be disappointment.

After a 4-1 loss to Detroit that kicked off this five-game road trip that was virtually going to make or break their season, they followed that up with their first ever win against Seattle, 6-2 and a 3-2 loss to Vancouver in which they played 10-15 strong minutes and were nearly able to pull off a stunner.

But Thursday night’s 8-3 loss in Edmonton has the Sabres sitting seven points back of Detroit for the second wild card spot with 11 games left to play. They allowed six unanswered goals, five in the third period, but the game was in-hand after Edmonton made it 4-3 with a Darnell Nurse shot through a crowd. That was followed by a Mattias Ekholm blast on a virtual 3-on-1 to make it 5-3. After that, things snowballed, and Buffalo couldn’t get it back to within one on a power play with under 8 minutes to play. The final three goals of the period were salt in the wound in a night filled with terrible puck luck and some unreal shots from the home side.

Acceptance is how we’re going to handle things here. We’re accepting that however the final 11 games play out that playoffs are no longer a realistic possibility and it’s time to take stock of how this season has gone. Yes, they have one more game with Detroit. Yes, they have two more at home with Washington who sits just out of the playoff picture behind the Red Wings. But unless Buffalo wins out and the rest of the teams in front of them fall apart completely, it’s all but done.

So…how’d we get to this point? Let’s scope it out.