Ottawa Senators fans proud despite heartbreaking Game 7 loss

The Senators may have had their playoff dreams dashed in a Game 7 double overtime heartbreaker to the Pittsburgh Penguins, but Ottawa fans say they're proud the underdogs made it this far in the chase for the Stanley Cup.

The pesky Sens played a great game and had a great season, and no one expected them to get this far, said George Pretli after Thursday night's 3-2 Eastern Conference final loss to the defending Stanley Cup champs in Pittsburgh.

"I'm a little bit disappointed for sure, but we did awesome. We took the champions to double overtime in Game 7, so that's much better than we thought they would do at the beginning of the year," Pretli said from Ottawa's Sens mile on downtown Elgin Street.

"They did awesome. We weren't supposed to beat Boston — OK, maybe we were, I don't know — but definitely we weren't supposed to beat the Rangers.... And we took [the Pittsburgh Penguins] to double overtime in Game 7. Can't do better than that."

Wearing a Sens jersey and a smile, Eric Husband said it's fun rooting for the underdog.

"I think it's incredible, what they've done, especially given all the adversity that they've faced. ... A lot of people counted this team out before we even made it into the playoffs, so the fact that we made it this far is incredible," he said.

"Everybody always counts us out. We're always the underdog. So it's fun to kind of surprise people and come out of nowhere and do something like what we did this year."

'I thought it was meant to be'

The Sens, meanwhile, are devastated but proud of their efforts.

Perhaps the most emotion was felt by goaltender Craig Anderson, who played a strong season despite his wife Nicholle Anderson's diagnosis in late October of a rare form of throat cancer.

"I thought it was meant to be, I thought it was our time. You need a little bit of luck on your side and a lot of things have got to go right, and like I said, it just didn't fall for us," Anderson told reporters in the locker-room.

"We weren't supposed to be here, we weren't supposed to do this. But inside this room we believed that we could achieve anything, and we put our mind to it, and a little bit of puck luck and maybe we're still standing."

Asked how he'll remember the season, he had one word: "Love."

"The love for the guys in here, right from the day I left the team to the day I came back, I wouldn't ask for better teammates than the guys this year."

The Penguins and Nashville Predators start their best-of-seven Stanley Cup final on Monday night in Pittsburgh.