BY IAN MENDES
sportsnet.ca

Perhaps 2011 is the year where the Boston Bruins exorcise all their playoff demons.

In the first round, they won a Game 7 for the first time in 17 years. And on Friday night, they completed a four-game sweep of the Philadelphia Flyers -- one year after one of the most epic collapses in NHL history.

The 5-1 win over the Flyers was a punctuation mark for a Boston team that was trying to shed a label of being a perennial playoff disappointment.

"As a player, you hear all the talk about what happened last year and you have to be able to ignore it to do what we just did," said netminder Tim Thomas, who made 22 saves in the victory. "I'm glad that's put behind us as a team and an organization. And I'm glad the fans can put it behind them too. Hopefully, we exorcised a demon."

"We just tried to play really hard. Nobody said it was going to be easy and obviously, we never thought it was going to be four games in a row," added captain Zdeno Chara.

Milan Lucic scored his first two goals of the playoffs to pace the Bruins' offence. Lucic's second goal of the game broke a 1-1 tie early in the third period. After Johnny Boychuk scored to make it 3-1, rookie Brad Marchand and Daniel Paille added empty net goals to seal the win.

"It feels good. This win, regardless of the two goals, is a huge win for our hockey club," said Lucic, who admitted he was getting frustrated after not scoring in the first 10 post-season games. "The last three years we've been looking for that eighth win to get into the third round."

The Bruins are headed to the conference final for the first time since 1992, ending the longest drought for reaching the third round of any Eastern Conference club. They will have home-ice advantage against the Tampa Bay Lightning in a series that is expected to start at some point next week.

Last season, the Flyers staged an improbable comeback from a 0-3 series deficit. For good measure, they even erased a 3-0 Bruins lead in Game 7 in this very same rink. But the rematch between them was hardly a contest, with Boston outscoring Philadelphia 20-7 during the four games.

"It's always disappointing to end your season with a loss. I'm not sure where it went wrong. It's a slippery slope when you stop playing your brand of hockey," said Flyers captain Mike Richards. "Give the Bruins credit - they played extremely well and we never had an answer for it."

"I'm not going to say the better team won. I'm going to say the team that was playing better is moving on," said Flyers veteran defenseman Sean O'Donnell. "They're hitting on all cylinders right now."

Peter Laviolette decided to switch goaltenders for Game 4, giving Sergei Bobrovsky the start in favor of Brian Boucher, who had given up 12 goals in the first three games of the series. The rookie netminder was solid Friday night and the Philadelphia fans and media - who are notoriously critical of their goalies - have no reason to lay the blame on Bobrovsky, who stopped 22 of the 25 shots he faced.

For all of the talk of inconsistent goaltending, Philadelphia's high-octane offence never delivered in the series. The offensively-gifted quintet of Daniel Briere, Mike Richards, Claude Giroux, Jeff Carter and Ville Leino combined for just two goals. Carter, however, was clearly not 100 per cent, having missed the first two games of this series with a knee injury.

"They have a system in place where you don't get much offensively. In a couple of games it didn't seem like we had jump or had our legs," added Richards, when asked about the Flyers offensive woes.

The Flyers were also devastated by the loss of Chris Pronger, who only appeared in three out of 11 playoff games for the Flyers this year. After playing in Game 1, Pronger missed the final three games of the series with an undisclosed injury. It was not immediately clear if Pronger would've been available to play if the series had been extended.

As for the Bruins, the only negative aspect to Friday's win was an injury suffered by Patrice Bergeron. The talented centre left the game after a crushing hit by Claude Giroux early in the third period. The extent of his injury was not revealed.