ALLARD: INSTEAD OF CHAMPAGNE, IT WAS MILLER TIME

Jean-Pierre Allard of Smarting Senators weighs in following the Senators' 3-2 loss to the Sabres in Game 4 of the East final last night, which kept Buffalo alive, now down 3-1 in the best-of-7 series.

I hate to bring up the subject of baseball at such a significant moment in the hockey season, but I'm seriously beginning to wonder if our friend Yogi Berra didn't get his sports mixed up when he allegedly uttered that 90% of baseball is half mental.

Seeing how mental the Eastern Conference finals between the Senators and the Sabres has suddenly become, the Hall of Fame Yankees catcher and great philosopher king may have had hockey in mind. Buffalo came into Scotiabank Place last night on the brink of elimination and no one was giving them any chances after they looked like a Junior B team in a 1-0 Game 3 loss in which they fired only 15 pucks at Ray Emery. Ottawa had not played a bad period of hockey all spring and at times has looked like it won't lose another game this spring.

Then Rockland native Derek Roy scored nine seconds into last night's game and just like that, the script had to be junked.

The Senators could have easily gone to their dressing room after 20 minutes up 2-1 if it wasn't for the fact they hit two goal posts, you could sense they just weren't on their game after a totally unecessary Andrej Meszaros turnover led to the home crowd-silencing and team-deflating early goal.

Maybe the Senators were guilty of thinking instead of playing in the first two periods. Who knows, perhaps they were also thinking that if Daniel Brière scores at the 27-second mark of Game 3, that game too would have followed yesterday's script.

Sometimes a game, even an entire series turns on a single play. Consider that after the Sabres went up 3-0 in the middle frame, the second goal of the period on a Chris Drury shot which Emery has to stop -- hence my well-documented assessment of "Shaky" Ray -- the Senators looked as done as cheap Buffalo wings.

Then the Senators got two goals in two minutes, which was not surprising at all, seeing that Buffalo had become totally discombobulated once Ottawa got a much needed breath of air with their first goal by Dean McAmmond.

What was even more surprising, other than Buffalo coach Lindy Ruff not calling a time-out after Ottawa made it 3-2, was the fact that the Senators did not tie the game before the end of the third period. At that time, I knew that Buffalo had dodged a huge bullet, and that they would somehow regroup.

They did thanks in large part to goalie Ryan Miller who regained the form he showed in Game 3, when he saved the Sabres from total embarrassment. Even back-to-back minor penalties, in which they peppered Miller with 10 shots during a 4:30 stretch, and countless close chances for the Senators were simply not enough in the third period to send the game into overtime.

Give the game puck to Ryan Miller.

Yesterday, I commented that Ottawa had not yet met a "real" goalie yet this spring, which only meant they had thus far benefited from an inexperienced Marc-Andre Fleury, a shaky Martin Brodeur and a thus-far weak Ryan Miller in 2 of the 3 games.

The Senators are about to face a hot goaltender much sooner than they had anticipated yesterday. Like on Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. (thank you, NBC Sports), when Miller will again try to stare down the Sens, who are suddenly a very alarming 0 for 12 with the man advantage across the past two games. And to think that yesterday, they were some foolish talks about the team measuring their chances against Dominik Hasek or Jean-Sébastien Giguère.

Daniel Alfredsson might have angered the hockey gods with his post-Game 4 theatrics. Combine that with Jason Spezza getting way ahead of himself yesterday in saying it would cost him some $25,000 to accommodate his famity/friends' ticket requests for 3 games of the Cup finals and you just have to wonder if it's all too coincidental that both these players, along with Dany Heatley, didn't grace us with their usual excellent effort last night.

Now, it's gut-checking time for the team in red, who really needs to end this series in five games and continue on its merry way to its first-ever berth in the Stanley Cup final.

Seeing how they played so nervously with a 1-0 deficit last night, I don't even want to begin imagining how they would look on SBP ice next Monday, faced with the daunting task of beating a hot Ryan Miler so as to avoid going back to Buffalo for The Decider. For it will have become a full-fledged head game by then, and we all know how Ottawa fares in that department.

Until then, here's a little piece of advice for Bryan Murray. How about putting part deux of the A.V. equipment, Antoine Vermette, on the second power-play unit. He can do better than Peter "Casper' Schaefer. And do not, I repeat, do not ever put Jason Spezza on the ice when your team is a man short.