It was a two-on-one break, the Capitals' Mike Gartner streaking in with the puck on one side, Peter Sundstrom on the other. In that instant or two, as the people saw the play develop, they arose with a roar that sent that silly noise meter high above Capital Centre edging toward 100.

This was it. This had to be it. Flyers goalie Ron Hextall was at the mercy of those two Capitals wingers. All night the sellout crowd had been mocking him, derisively chanting his name, "Hex-tall, Hex-tall," getting on him almost as brutally as some Spectrum fans had two nights before. And now they sensed the almost certain kill.

Gartner did what he was supposed to do, forcing Hextall to protect that side, then passing neatly, crisply to Sundstrom on the other side. The noise meter quivered at 100, was about to go over the top, when Hextall's right leg shot out. Sundstrom's point-blank shot was headed for the corner of the net, but it never got there. Somehow, Hextall blocked it.

The people, stunned, sat down. Incredibly, the Capitals had been denied again. You couldn't blame them for wondering whether "Somebody Up There" simply didn't want them to win. It wasn't His fault, though; it was somebody down there — the tall, young guy guarding the Flyers' net.

Through five minutes of overtime Saturday night, Ron Hextall was, well, Ron Hextall, the goaltender who carried the Flyers to the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final a year ago. It was a shooting gallery out there. The Capitals kept coming in waves; they had learned their lesson in last year's seventh game against the Islanders. This time they weren't about to sit back and wait for a break. There would be no four overtimes in this seventh game. They were determined to shoot the works, to either destroy that "choke" label that had been hung on them or expend every last bit of energy in the attempt.

Four or five times, they were that close to ending it. And four or five times Hextall stopped them.

"He was really fantastic," Flyers Coach Mike Keenan said. "No question about it."

The Capitals clearly deserved to win. But sometimes one chance is enough.

Not this time. The Capitals kept storming into the Flyers' end, kept firing at the acrobat in the Flyers' cage. Finally, justice was served. The game ended — on a clean breakaway by Dale Hunter, who spotted an opening between Hextall's legs and shot the puck through it.

Down by the Flyers' net, Ron Hextall stood stunned, devastated by the sudden ending to a season of turmoil. Ron Sutter was the first to reach him, putting a gloved hand on the goalie's head, patting him gently. When he got to the locker room, Hextall just sat there in full uniform for several minutes, his head buried in his hands. In his mind, this was his loss, his failure. One good game couldn't make up for all those bad ones. The real Ron Hextall had arrived on the scene too late.

"Nothing's good when you lose," he said. "It doesn't matter how good you played or how bad you played. If you lost, you lost. I didn't play well and that's probably the biggest part of the reason we lost. . . . If I would have played better, we might have won it in the fifth or sixth game. It's kind of tough. It's going to be a long summer."

Hey, nobody ever said pro hockey makes sense. But for all its shortcomings it can, at times, make for riveting theater — and this was one of those times. It was also, we should note, the fifth time in the last seven years that the Flyers, for all their tradition of success, have been knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. But never, never had they been knocked out like this, with victory seemingly all but wrapped up, a 3-1 lead and, after letting that get away, a three-goal lead in the second period of Game 7.

"It's been a weird season, injuries and controversy, everything," Rick Tocchet said.

Everything but the ability to win the games they had to win — the regular-season finale that could have given them the home-ice advantage against the Caps, the seventh playoff game that Hextall, for all his Saturday night heroics, couldn't save. Put simply, they lost on merit to a team that displayed the energy, the determination that, in better times, was a Flyers trademark.

Frank Dolson is a Philadelphia Inquirer sports columnist.