WASHINGTON -- Martin St. Louis, fluctuating as he always does between French and English in his postgame press conference, found the right words, in English, to describe what the Montreal Canadiens are going through now and what lies ahead.
"The pain that you feel right now is normal, but I think it's not even close to what's coming," the Canadiens coach said. "The joy that's coming."
The Canadiens took the hard road to get to the Stanley Cup Playoffs, breaking down doors along the way and fast-tracking their graduation from rebuilding team to contending team. That's as far as they could take it this season. The Washington Capitals made sure of that.
For the Canadiens, it goes into the books as a 4-1 loss in Game 5 to cap a five-game loss to Washington in the Eastern Conference First Round.
It'll look like the Canadiens weren't close, especially because they dropped the last two games by three goals.
Looks can be deceiving.
"It was hard," Capitals forward Tom Wilson said. "I gained a lot of respect for that team over there."
Washington coach Spencer Carbery went on for three and a half minutes about the Canadiens after he was asked what they showed him.
He compared preparing to coach against Montreal's top line of Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky to what it was like for him as a Toronto Maple Leafs' assistant from 2021-23 game-planning for the likes of Nikita Kucherov and Brayden Point.
He brought up Canadiens rookie defenseman Lane Hutson, who could win the Calder Trophy this season. He praised rookie forward Ivan Demidov, saying he didn't want to talk about him during the season because he thought the 19-year-old would then go out and score a hat trick.
He touched on the veteran players on the team like Brendan Gallagher, Josh Anderson, Christian Dvorak and Joel Armia guiding the group.
"Long-winded way of saying that they have a bright future," Carbery said.
The Canadiens know all of that. They're not built yet. They're building toward the better days ahead and what they went through in these five games against Washington is a part of it.
But even knowing that, it was still hard for the Canadiens now, in the direct aftermath of Game 5, to see the light guiding them toward the future.
Instead, like true competitors and professionals always do, they talked about the what-ifs. They talked about how close they were and where it got away. They didn't speak about regret, but they did look back to consider what could have been.
"It's disappointing," Gallagher said. "It just kind of felt like every game there were one or two things that were the difference, and that's part of learning. You've got to go through this. It was for most of our group the first experience here and it's the stuff you have to go through, a lesson you hopefully don't have to learn again. I'm assuming they'll say the same thing, it felt like every game was close. They just made a few less mistakes and it burned us."
The facts are sobering for the Canadiens.
They had a chance in Game 1, coming back from down 2-0 in the third period to get the game to overtime, but they couldn't win it. Alex Ovechkin sunk them.
They had a 1-0 lead in the second period of Game 2, but that was short-lived and they lost 3-1.
They had a 2-1 lead going into the third period of Game 4, but Washington scored four unanswered goals in the final 13:21 and won 5-2.
Montreal was outshooting the Capitals 8-1 and controlling play in the first nine minutes of Game 5, but then Dylan Strome won a face-off on the power play, Ovechkin hammered a shot past goalie Jakub Dobes, and before the Canadiens could find their footing again in the third it was 3-0.
"We had a great start," Suzuki said. "I thought we could have been up 2-0, and we were down 2-0, so just kind of got in the hole. And I think that power-play goal at the end of the second made it pretty tough for us to come back."
But the Canadiens kept buzzing in the third period. Emil Heineman scored at 2:40 to make it 3-1. Montreal had 14 shots on goal, four with Dobes pulled before Brandon Duhaime's empty-net goal at 19:34.
"This team hasn't ever quit," Gallagher said. "Going back the last couple of years when we were out of playoff races, this team competes. That's just the makeup of the group. So, I expected nothing less."
The expectations go up for the Canadiens from here. They've set a new standard. They've raised the bar. They earned respect in the National Hockey League.
"If we introduced ourselves to the rest of the league through these playoffs, especially being the youngest team, I think we can walk out of here with our head held high," St. Louis said. "We didn't leave any stone unturned."
The Canadiens are on the move forward. Losing in five in the first round to the top seed in the Eastern Conference doesn't change that.
It is, in fact, the next step to the Canadiens finding the joy that comes after the pain.
"You can already feel it," forward Jake Evans said. "This is a tough feeling, but it's the lowest we want to be at. … I really do believe there's something special going on."
