The Patrice Bergeron Line is rolling, with a combined 20 points through two games and looking better than they have all season. Auston Matthews, dropping a ‘s--t happens’ after Saturday’s 7-3 beatdown, is still without a point and looking completely outmatched in a head-to-head with Bergeron. Meanwhile, Nazem Kadri is still suspended, Leo Komarov is out, and this series feels kinda over.

And tonight’s Game 3 meeting in Toronto will either confirm or dispel such a notion.

They’ve always said that it’s not a series until the road team wins a game. That, in a seven-game format that gives the home team the advantage, is obviously true. But at some point, we need to see some sort of pushback from the Maple Leafs to truly believe that they’re indeed alive, no?

Listen, you can go back to Game 1 and look at three power-play goals from the Bruins and say that a 5-1 final was not indicative of how tight a game it truly was. But there’s no way to dance around what happened this past Saturday; the Bruins weathered an early Toronto storm, lit Frederik Andersen up for four goals, and simply hung back for the final 40 minutes of a 7-3 victory.

“We talked about this series being, it’s going to be a tough series. We know it has been and it will continue to be and we know that they’re a tight-checking team; they play hard. We aren’t just, you know, playing against them for four games during the regular season,” said Bergeron. “In the playoffs, the intensity increases, so that’s what we got. We had good starts the last two games; we can definitely do better in the second and third – especially [Saturday]. I felt like they gave it to us a little bit and we’ll get back to the drawing board and look at the video and keep getting better.”

The Bruins will likely get better tonight, too, with the expected return of third-line center Riley Nash.

Absent from the final five games of the regular season and first two postseason contests due to an ear laceration that also came with some concussion-like symptoms, Nash will return to a third line featuring Danton Heinen and David Backes on the wings. The return of Nash, the straw that undoubtedly stirs the bottom-six drink of the B’s forward group, will slot Noel Acciari back down to the right side of a relentless fourth line with Tim Schaller on the left and Sean Kuraly in the middle.

Matt Grzelcyk looks ‘doubtful’ for this game, meaning Nick Holden will likely slide in on a third pairing with Adam McQuaid. Holden had a goal and five points in 18 regular-season games with the Bruins.

A win would also give the Bruins a 3-0 edge for the first time in any series since the 2013 Eastern Conference Finals against the Penguins, a series that the Bruins ultimately took by way of a sweep.

“It’s a great start,” Tuukka Rask said of Boston’s opening two games of the postseason. “The way we wanted it, the way people in Boston wanted it. Now we got to go on the road and obviously it’s going to be a lot tougher playing in their home building and trying to grind out some wins out of there.”

Loose pucks: Ryan Donato, Brian Gionta, and Tommy Wingels appear to be your healthy scratches tonight… Largely meaningless to this current group, of course, but the Bruins are 12-2 in their last 14 Game 3 contests dating back to 2010. The team that won Game 3 has gone on to win that series in all but two of those 14 series.

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