I have written all of adult life and pay attention to fine writing wherever I find it. So this is Tara Sullivan. (“ I don’t just cover the sports. I cover the people.”) I was moved to email her an appreciation of her piece on G7. The first sentence sets the tone, which the reader feels. That is one cardinal test of fine writing: to transport the reader to the scene or into the emotions, to make them feel. She is a fine wordsmith and well-schooled in her craft. I have bolded below the parallel construction that is to writing what a canon is to music. It's really good, she's really good.

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Steady streams of black-and-gold-clad fans worked their way up TD Garden’s many stairwells Sunday night, backs turned against the cruelty of what they had just witnessed down on the ice.

Shocked into silence by the Bruins’ overtime loss to the Florida Panthers in Game 7 of this first-round Stanley Cup playoff series, their stunned faces and slumped shoulders told a story destined to be remembered forever, not for the glory envisioned after these Bruins turned in a record-setting regular season, but for the embarrassment and disappointment of one of the worst choke jobs in Boston sports history.

With the stunning 4-3 loss, the Bruins were bounced from the playoffs, failing to protect a third-period lead in this game, failing to close out a 3-1 lead in this series.

When Florida forward Carter Verhaeghe put the puck past Bruins’ goaltender Jeremy Swayman at 8:35 of overtime, these Bruins consigned themselves to the scrap heap of history, failing to fulfill their destiny, relegated to the sad list of almost-greats. Think 2007 Patriots, but only if those Pats had lost their undefeated regular season record in the opening playoff game against the Jaguars instead of losing to the Giants in the Super Bowl.

“Stupefying,” was one of the words first-year Bruins coach Jim Montgomery was left to utter. “I guess the words that come to mind right now is disappointment, confusion.”

No wonder. His Bruins were overwhelming favorites to lift the Stanley Cup, the NHL’s best team in the regular season, and one of the best of all time, earning the top overall seed for postseason play after notching a league-record 65 wins and totalling an unprecedented 135 points. They cruised into the playoffs with their eyes cast toward a long straight road to a title. The Florida Panthers? Nothing more than a speed bump on the way to June, an overmatched opponent that was the last team to qualify for the playoff field, the second wild card out of the Eastern Conference who finished 43 points behind the Bruins in the standings.

But here came sports, once again interrupting the conversation and delivering us the best reality show of them all. These are the same Panthers who won the Presidents’ Trophy for the league’s best record a season ago only to get bounced in the second round of the playoffs. They knew they could pay that evil favor forward against Boston, using the grit and drive they needed just to get into the field as fuel to keep the drive going.

Here came sports, so beautifully unpredictable and unpredictably beautiful all at once, built on the very foundation of win-or-go-home, all-the-marbles stakes that we saw on Sunday, stakes that now send the Bruins home with nothing but a mountain of unanswered questions. Stakes that cannot be scripted, destined to be waged in real time before our eyes, taking us all on an emotional journey we won’t soon forget, or forgive.

This is what Game 7 does. From the moment the puck dropped Sunday evening, TD Garden felt like it was being held together with tension and sweat. The packed house of diehards quickly attached themselves to any sliver of hope, an anxious band of nervous believers who wasted little time moving from the edge of their seats to jumping clean out of them.

Rising in swells with any action near the Florida goal, groaning with fear with any chances at the opposite end, going hoarse with cheers for every Bruin block or save, cascading their boos for officials daring to make any call against the home team. Such is the unique frequency of a hockey crowd, its sound raining from the highest rafters until settling, like a blanket, atop the ice, billowing and floating in waves crashing alternately from side to side, up and down, not simply swallowing those in its path, but carrying them along for the ensuing ride.

The Bruins wanted so badly to reward that faith.

And yet they came out messy, once again a pale imitation of the regular-season machine. Across a nerve-jangling initial period, they couldn’t cash in on repeated early chances against Florida goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, and when Florida defenseman Brandon Montour slapped a backhand shot past Swayman with 7:37 to go until the first intermission, the volume in the garden dropped precipitously. That Swayman, starting his first game of the series after embattled Linus Ullmark was benched following consecutive losses in Games 5 and 6, could have (should have) made the save, only jangled those collective nerves a little more.

The building got even quieter early in the second period, when Sam Reinhart gave Florida a 2-0 lead, the ensuing smattering of attempts to start some “Let’s Go Bruins” chants dying in the icy air.

Yet there was veteran David Krejci with a power-play goal late in the second, cutting the deficit in half, breathing some life into the nervous crowd. And then came the third period, when then the Bruins used the final seconds of an overlapped power play to tie the game. A power-play strike, this time from playoff hero Tyler Bertuzzi, to rally more hope, and then a go-ahead sizzling rebound by sublime scorer David Pastrnak, and the crowd finally unleashed their joy, willing the playoff clock to move faster than time itself.

The one-minute countdown was announced, promising delirium to come.

But this is playoff hockey, and this is sports, with no feeling quite so painful as that of lost opportunity. Now, after an unthinkable loss and an unimaginable end, that’s all the Bruins have left.