CHICAGO - One day during the Vancouver-Chicago series, Scotty Bowman leaned over a table where a couple of scribes were dining and said, sotto voce: "You know what Toe Blake used to say about the media, don't you?"

We looked up expectantly.

"When you're losing, they can't help you. And when you're winning, you don't need 'em."

And he walked off, with a wink and that ever-present half-smirk. The hero of that evening's game, Chicago's Dustin Byfuglien, was not among the players the Blackhawks — adhering to the letter of the NHL law, going not one inch further than required — produced to be interviewed the following day.

So it was probably not a coincidence, with the Godfather in and out of the Hawks' dressing room these days — perhaps offering the odd bit of counsel to his son Stan, the Chicago GM — that captain Jonathan Toews was conspicuously absent from the available list Saturday.

It didn't necessarily mean anything, except that Toews is the stand-up guy who has been there every day, answering every question, taking on every mini-crisis, all the way through this playoff run. So his absence (no doubt upon advice), while he struggles to find his game against the Flyers, may be a sign of the Hawks' collective sphincter tightening just a bit, as they face the kind of challenge no one has put before them since some early first-round bother with the Nashville Predators.

The Philadelphia Flyers, however, are a whole new level of bother.

Kris Versteeg, the first of the Hawks to appear in the dressing room, groused more than once about "a few shitty bounces, and they end up in our net."

Of course, his right shoulder was the critical body part on the fourth and ultimately decisive Philadelphia goal in Game 4 by winger Ville Leino, whose mis-hit shot struck Versteeg and deflected past Antti Niemi early in the third period of the Flyers' 5-3, series-tying win.

In fact, every one of the goals the Hawks gave up in Game 4 was just a little unlucky — or that's the message they're putting out, though hopefully not swallowing whole.

"Well, in the first period I thought 'generous' would probably be a way of describing all three goals," said Chicago head coach Joel Quenneville. "You can say all four goals against us were uncharacteristic of the type of goals we give up all year. So you look at those isolated incidents and it's a big factor in the way the game is being played and the outcome at the end."

Defenceman Niklas Hjalmarsson's pair of first-period gaffes — having the puck stolen off his stick from behind on Mike Richards's opening goal, then failing to clear a puck that was lying, unmoving, in front of the Chicago net on Matt Carle's 2-0 goal — were bad enough. But the freebie the Hawks donated to Claude Giroux, when he sneaked in behind everybody and stood abandoned at the side of the net awaiting Kimmo Timonen's assist, 51 seconds after the Hawks had scored to climb back within one, was unforgivable.

But making themselves feel better is one thing; believing they are somehow victims of outrageous bad luck is quite another. The fact is, the Hawks were outplayed and outmatched in both games in Philadelphia, and it's starting to look like the ship is listing.

They don't seem to have enough shifts to limit the impact Hall of Fame-bound defenceman Chris Pronger is having on this series, not merely by turning the Hawks' hairy mammoth, Byfuglien, into a quivering mass of jelly but by neutralizing Toews, as well — and just generally irrititating, prodding, pokechecking, half-hooking, half-slashing, half-crosschecking everyone who dares enter his area code.

There's little doubt Pronger is getting away with a variety of misdemeanours. Maybe he has charmed the referees with his rapier-like wit and gap-toothed smile, or maybe he's just doing the crimes with such subtlety, the officials are standing back and admiring his work.

But however they rationalize it, the Hawks have no answer for him, and they need to come up with one in a hurry. That was the idea of splitting up Toews and Patrick Kane for the third period of Friday's game, and it did result in a harder push and more offensive zone time.

But then, the Flyers were playing with the lead — a three-goal lead at the start — and it's dangerous to draw too many conclusions from what happens during prevent-defence time.

Their teammates were quick to defend Kane and Toews, but stats don't lie. The line has a goal (from Kane) and four assists in four games, nothing like the carnage they wreaked upon the Canucks and Sharks.

"It's not only [Kane and Toews] that lost the battle. The whole team lost the battle," said forward Tomas Kopecky. "We all know what we're playing for. I don't think anyone has taken a shift off, but we just have to work even a little harder to get the kind of bounces they got last night."

"They're a part of our team — they're not the whole team." said defenceman Brian Campbell, who has been down this road before, and has no doubt the rolling boulder can be halted, and pushed back in the other direction.

"I know I faced Philly when I played in Buffalo, and we won the first two, they won the next two, and we went on to win in six," he said. "Do they have a bit more momentum than us right now? Sure. And we have home ice advantage. It's a new series."

"If you'd offered us a best-of-three to win the Stanley Cup at the beginning of the year, we'd have taken it," said Andrew Ladd, who returned to the lineup Friday and added some much needed grit.

But if you'd offered them a 2-2 series after Game 2, they probably wouldn't have taken that. It's where they find themselves, though.

Three games or fewer, less than a week, from the end. Uphill all the way