PHILADELPHIA — The most revealing moment of the most riveting game of this NHL postseason didn’t feature a player on the ice or a coach on the bench. It, of course, did not feature the Flyers, either, but they were connected to the moment, if you care about them.

On Sunday night, in Game 7 of the Winnipeg Jets-St. Louis Blues first-round series, a TNT camera gave viewers a close-up shot of a middle-aged woman in the Canada Life Centre stands. Her face was grim, for good reason; the Jets were down two goals. And the broader context of the shot made it even more compelling.

Winnipeg is the smallest city to have an NHL franchise. Fewer than 850,000 people lived there as of 2023. The average annual temperature is 38 degrees Fahrenheit. In January, if the temperature tops out at 4 degrees, that’s a balmy day. The place is not exactly a tourist destination. So even though they have advanced past the playoffs’ second round just once and have never reached a Stanley Cup Final — neither in their first iteration, from 1979 to 1996, nor in this one — the Jets matter to Winnipeg in a way few NHL franchises matter to their home regions. Once the town got its team back in 2011, when the Atlanta Thrashers relocated there, the Jets sold out their first 332 home games, and this season, they were the best team in the league. But now they were down late in Game 7 to the Blues. It looked like they were about to lose, and this woman, obviously a devoted fan, looked like she was about to cry.

The Jets did not lose. They scored two goals in the final two minutes of regulation, including one with less than three seconds left, to tie the game, then won it in double overtime. An NHL arena during a playoff game is like a pot of boiling water, and when Adam Lowry tipped home Neal Pionk’s point shot to send the Jets to the second round and keep their Cup hopes alive, the lid blew off that pot. It was the kind of moment that makes the league’s postseason tournament one of the most thrilling events in all of sports. It was the kind of moment the Flyers haven’t experienced in a long, long time.

They might not experience one like it for a long time yet. Based on Monday night’s lottery, they will have the sixth pick in next month’s NHL draft. It was a rough result for them, given they had the league’s fourth-worst record this season. They tanked, and it turned out tanking didn’t help them.

For an organization that needs to add talent at center as part of its rebuild, that needs a stud in the middle to pair with Matvei Michkov, this draft would seem to offer an opportunity for major improvement. The pool of center prospects is deep, but is it so deep that one of those players will be available at No. 6? The Flyers entered the lottery hoping they could add the kind of franchise centerpiece they thought they were getting when they made Nolan Patrick the second pick in the 2017 draft. That decision set them back years. A similar miss this year became more likely with the lottery’s outcome, and it would hurt them badly.

It would hurt the entire league, actually. The Flyers haven’t won a non-COVID-bubble playoff series since 2012. They were mediocre or less than mediocre for years before committing, at last, to a genuine refresh. They are the NHL’s equivalent of the Washington Commanders: a once-proud franchise that had fallen into irrelevance, a crown jewel smudged by incompetence, a sleeping giant that would increase overall interest in the sport if it were to return to excellence.

That’s the oft-forgotten aspect of the Flyers’ moribund era: It didn’t damage just their standing in the Philadelphia market. It didn’t just make it more difficult for the team to retain fans, let alone expand its fan base. It hurt the entire league.

There is plenty about this year’s playoffs that has been marvelous — the quality of play, the drama of the games — and there is the possible benefit for the sport’s traditionalists that, among the Jets, the Edmonton Oilers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs, a Canadian team might win the Stanley Cup for the first time in 32 years.

Look again, though, at what the playoffs are missing. No New York Rangers. No Boston Bruins. No Chicago Blackhawks. And, as usual lately, no Flyers. Philadelphia is a big market that cares about its hockey team, or did care and could again. Philadelphia has a lot of Flyers fans just like that woman in Winnipeg. Imagine a camera shot a few years from now from inside the Xfinity Mobile Arena, the next name of the Wells Fargo Center. Imagine a playoff game here that meant so much. After Monday night, that vision just got a little harder to see.

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