By: Joe Ballway, YawkeyTalkies Staff Writer

In the first period of Saturday night’s game against the Panthers, David Krejci skated up the boards and flung a desperate, bad-angle shot at Thomas Vokoun as he was forced into the corner. The puck caught the Florida netminder off guard, sneaking through his legs and across the line.

Then, with the game on the line in the third round of the shootout, Marc Savard skated in and fumbled the puck as he deked. Vokoun lost sight of the puck and stayed with Savard as it found its way underneath him, keeping the Bruins alive on another fortuitous bounce. Savard laughed visibly as he skated back to the bench–a loose reaction of joy better associated with the ’08-09 squad than this year’s embattled crew.

It looks like the Bruins are finally getting their breaks.

And now they’ll have the Olympic break, a two-week recess in which the players can ease up a little after stringing together four straight wins. Just one week after losing ten in a row and slipping to 12th in the conference, they’ve jumped all the way back up to 7th place. With four other teams nipping at their heels, however, momentum andconfidence from this four-game stretch will be important in getting the Bruins through the final quarter of the season.

A healthy team will be important, too, and the Bruins are almost back to full strength. Their chemistry finally seems to be returning thanks to the growing number of healthy skaters. They’ve been aided on the back end by the return of Andrew Ference and stronger play from Zdeno Chara and Dennis Wideman. Up front, the Wheeler-Krejci-Ryder line is gaining steam, and Savard has resumed dishing the puck with authority. Even Milan Lucic, who has just 10 points in 28 games, got in on the act with a recent 2-goal effort.

But Tuukka Rask has been the real catalyst for Boston’s recent success, starting the last six games and stopping 188 of 195 shots. It appears that he has finally supplanted Tim Thomas as starting goaltender–a rather stunning development for the defending Vezina Trophy winner.

But that’s just one example of the unexpected twists and turns the Bruins have encountered this year.

The offense still ranks 30th in the league with 149 goals. The Bruins have won their last three games by just one goal, including a game that they led 5-0 at one point. It’s really a microcosm of how this season, nothing has come easily. It seems that each and every night, the game is an adventure down to the final buzzer–or, in more recent cases, the final shootout attempt.

That trend will likely continue down the stretch run as the Bruins battle to remain in the top eight. Whether or not they make a trade, though, they will definitely be a better team coming out of the break than they were a week ago. One would think that the recently acquired confidence, coupled with the improving health of the players, would be enough to propel this current group into the postseason.

It all depends on whether or not they can continue to find themselves on the right side of these close games.

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