What goes around, comes around.

Chances are, you’ve heard this mantra since you were a little kid. Maybe not those words, exactly. Maybe your parents chose: “you made your bed, now lie in it” or “you reap what you sow,” or any of a number of other sayings.

Point is, whether you believe in karma or not, things tend to come full circle in the end.

There’s been a lot of that in this first-round playoff series between the Bruins and Canadiens. As you well know, much was made of Mike Ribeiro’s apparent on-ice agony in the final minute of Game 3. He was writhing in pain and the game was stopped as the Bruins stormed into the offensive zone with the goalie out and an extra attacker on.

Moments later, Ribeiro was laughing on the bench and taunting Martin Lapointe of the Bruins. The Canadiens won that game, but Ribeiro’s bad karma set the stage for the Game 4 comeuppance. You know the story. Alexei Kovalev, recoiling from an apparent slash, put his head down and ran into teammate Sheldon Souray, taking the all-star defenseman out of the play. That left Glen Murray with a clean breakaway, and he did not disappoint.

Hockey karma had come full circle. And Kovalev was given no slack from the other men in the Canadiens locker room.

“You stop playing? In double overtime?” was the rhetorical question posed to reporters by Souray after the game. No one answered.

“If a penalty is not called,” said Habs coach Claude Julien, “you can’t stop playing.

“It’s a crappy way to lose.”

It is, indeed. But flopping to the ice (Andrei Markhov was helped off the ice twice last night but managed to log nearly 34 minutes of ice time) is a crappy way to play hockey. The Bruins don’t draw as many penalties as they should because they are so strong on their skates, and seldom fall when hooked or slashed. In the end, it’s the way the game is supposed to be played.

So what do we make of the 5-1 loss at the FleetCenter Thursday? It’s the beauty of sports. You may love the outcome, or hate the outcome, but you cannot predict the outcome. Canadiens may be flopping on the ice like so many out-or-water starfish, but when they play with urgency they are a formidable team. They may writhe in pain like they’ve been shot after any and all contact, but they avoided elimination.

The Canadiens took the ice last night with the full support of more than 21,000 Habs fans at the Bell Centre, but they’ve insulted the rest of the hockey world. It’s a game of honor, and the Habs have shown little in this series.

In 1979, the Bruins suffered the ultimate defeat when they were called for too many men on the ice in Game 7 against Montreal. In this series, there have been too many men lying on the ice.
Lewiston native Tom Caron is a NESN sports analyst for Red Sox and Bruins telecasts.