If they weren't standing upright, you might think you had walked into a morgue.
Drained, their skin pasty, their eyes either sandbagging tears or staring empty into the unseeable distance, the Ottawa Senators did their duty and met the swarming, annoying media at the end of their remarkable spring run.
The Senators' 2016-17 season came to an end, appropriately, a few ticks before midnight on Thursday when – who else but? – Sidney Crosby sent a perfect pass out to Chris Kunitz and Kunitz's shot flew over goaltender Craig Anderson's shoulder and into the Ottawa net.
It was 5:09 of the second overtime and it gave Crosby's Pittsburgh Penguins a 3-2 victory and the right to play the Nashville Predators for the Stanley Cup. A victory would mean a second consecutive championship for the Penguins and the 29-year-old Crosby's third Cup in his guaranteed Hall-of-Fame career.
The sound of Pittsburgh in full cheer could still be heard in the visiting team's dressing room. Perhaps because there was no sound other than the murmured questions of the media and the long, long pauses before the shortest of answers.
"Shock," said Anderson as he stood there near tears. He had made 39 saves on the night, some of them spectacular, and his three misses were not even worthy of question.
"Surreal," he added after several beats. "Doesn't feel like it's actually happened … but it has."
It happened, all right. And it was, in many ways, one of the more unusual stories of a year in the life of an NHL team. This was, after all, a team supposedly still in a long rebuilding phase. It had missed the playoffs a year ago. It had a new general manager in Pierre Dorion, a long-time scout in the system, and Dorion had hired a new coach from the Swiss leagues, Guy Boucher.
Boucher arrived with more baggage than whatever held his skates, stick and whistle. He had had a short sojourn in the NHL as coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning and was remembered solely for one highly embarrassing moment when the Philadelphia Flyers called his bluff on his obsessively defensive playing style. When Boucher's team refused to fore-check, Philadelphia defenceman Chris Pronger refused to advance the puck, leading to a ridiculous stand-off of non-motion in what is billed as "the fastest game in the world." Boucher was soon out of the NHL and in Europe, hoping for one more chance.
Boucher's controlling manner was widely expected to clash with free-spirited defenceman Erik Karlsson, who likes nothing better than to jump up into the play.
It didn't happen. Boucher had obviously learned a primary lesson for coaching – get along with your superstar – and Karlsson largely bought into Boucher's defence-first system. He had a year so spectacular, particularly in the final months, that Karlsson is today a finalist for the Norris Trophy as the league's best defenceman. It will be his third if he wins.
Slowly the Senators moulded into a team, as much off the ice as on. They rallied around their most popular player, Clarke MacArthur, who missed nearly two full seasons with concussion symptoms, only to return gloriously in the final days of the season and contribute greatly in the postseason. And they rallied around their goaltender, Anderson, and his family as Nicholle Anderson underwent treatment for a rare cancer in the throat area. They dealt with broken feet (Karlsson), injured hands (Bobby Ryan and others) and a chopped finger (Marc Methot).
"We are brothers," Methot said time and time again.
There was panic in the final weeks but they squeaked into the playoffs. They played the "underdog" card against Boston Bruins and then the New York Rangers and beat both teams. They admitted they "had no chance" against the Penguins – "the best team on the planet," according to Boucher – and yet they had a real chance: one lucky shot in that overtime and this would be an entirely different story.
There were the charming stories such as little Jean-Gabriel Pageau's four-goal night against the Rangers, the last winning the game in overtime.
There were inspirational stories, such as MacArthur's series-winning goal against Boston – scored, of course, in overtime.
They played with fans' blood pressure as well as with their hearts, winning six of eight overtimes in the playoffs.
It wasn't pretty hockey to watch, but they made it embraceable with their humour. The players joked about their coach's mantra – "Rest is a weapon" – and they even kidded about Boucher's passive defence-first,-second and -third philosophy. "We'll bore them out of the building," MacArthur said for the team's plan for Game 7.
Well, they didn't. Even the Ottawa fans – at least those who filled most of the seats at the rink – got into it, chanting "one-three-one" in the final match at Canadian Tire Centre, the reference being Boucher's much-condemned "system" of having one forward sort-of fore-checking, three players stacking the red line, one defender well back.
In the end, though, it wasn't enough to defeat Crosby and Kunitz, Evgeni Malkin, Phil Kessel and all the other Penguins.
"We lost to the better team," Karlsson said.
But the young captain was philosophical about it. One of the team's shortcomings going into the series was experience; well, now they have experience.
"Now we know a little more what it takes," he says. "We know what we have to do in the future.
"I don't think we have any regrets other than we wanted to win."
Over in another corner of the visitors' dressing room, Ryan, who had scored the Game 6 winner to force this Game 7, was equally pale, equally drained, but just as positive.
"We have nothing to hang our heads about," he said.
True, but still hard to take. Off to the left, still blinking hard, Anderson was coming to terms with what it meant for him to lose this chance at a final on one lucky shot. At 36, the chance might not again come his way.
"It wasn't in the cards for us," he said, pausing for a deep breath.
"I thought it was meant to be. I thought it was our time."
Roy MacGregor