For one glorious night Wednesday, the Philadelphia Flyers reset the clock to the spring on 1974, travelling on Professor Bob Clarke's wayback machine. Sure, the sweaters were black instead of Halloween orange and there were some of those Europeans sprinkled throughout the lineup instead of toothless Canadians, but the modern Flyers managed to transmogrify themselves into the Broad Street Bullies -- minus the brawling -- to claw back into their series against the Buffalo Sabres.

The night game began with Lauren Hart singing a virtual duet of God Bless America with the late Kate Smith, the talisman of those fierce Flyers teams, and it ended in the final minute with hats and pompoms and freebie orange T-shirts and other debris littering the ice after Simon Gagne's empty-net goal put a final punctuation on a 4-2 win in Game 3. In-between the Flyers punished the Sabres with body checks; menacing Flyers defenseman Denis Gauthier speared Buffalo's J.P. Dumont in the gut -- not hard but right where the forward had undergone surgery earlier in the season for a sports hernia -- and the sellout crowd lustily jeered the fallen Sabre; Peter Forsberg channeled his inner Clarkie by banking in a couple of goals off the Sabres and also taking a charging penalty; Broad Street era goalie Bernie Parent appeared on the video screen to show off his pair of Stanley Cup rings and lead a "Let's Go, Flyers" chant; and two dandy fights broke out in the crowd. The circus was going on across the parking lot in the old Spectrum, but the big top of the Wachovia Center had the real action.

Detroit expropriated the name Hockeytown, but Philadelphia is the best, most passionate American hockey city. Not the most sophisticated -- the panacea for the Flyers woes at any given time have always been reduced to "Hit somebody"; Flyers fans love to snack on hockey tartare -- but the most engaged. Maybe the Flyers can't quite match the Red Wings body-for-body in attendance, but this is the only U.S. city that loyally supports the NHL team and the Flyers' minor-league affiliate, the Phantoms, who haunt the Spectrum perhaps 150 yards away from the big rink. The Wings could barely draw in the Dead Things Era of early and mid-1980s, but the Flyers have packed in crowds since 1967-68, when the NHL expanded beyond the so-called Original Six. The Flyers have done it with only minor successes in recent times. While the Wings have won three Stanley Cups since 1997 (sweeping Philly that spring), the Flyers have only those long-ago titles, in 1974 and 1975, to fall back on.

The Flyers don't look capable of adding another Cup this year. But in the second period, when they outshot Buffalo, 17-9, when Forsberg was dangling and Gauthier was spearing and a few people in the he crowd were throwing haymakers, the Flyers made the small, quick, clever Sabres merely look small.