Your team, your town, your Philadelphia Flyers did it again. They won their third straight after dropping 10 in a row, which was mixed in with Alain Vigneault getting fired and a dog shitting on the logo at center ice.

We wouldn’t call the Devils or Coyotes world beaters, but the Flyers snapped the streak with a quality road win in Vegas and have now scored 15 goals in three games, which lifts them to 11-12-4 with a chance to break even on Thursday in Montreal. The Habs are 6-21-3 and absolutely stink.

I guess the question is whether we want the Flyers to win or not. A brief foray on social media reveals mostly apathy. People don’t seem to be excited for the prospect of treading the playoff line, only to fall short or go out in the first round. They don’t seem to be excited for a full season of Mike Yeo. That’s not the case for everybody, of course, but you get the sense most people would prefer for the bottom to fall out, so that significant changes take place. You want to win big or lose big, because otherwise you’re in hockey purgatory.

But for now, an enjoyable win at home.

“I think it started in Vegas, playing the right way, playing with structure,” said Cam Atkinson after the 6-1 win. “I think you get rewarded when you’re playing the right way, and obviously coming home after those two wins we want to make it harder for them to come into this rink, knowing that next time anyone steps into this rink it’s going to be a hard night. I think we took strides in that direction and it’s good.”

Atkinson’s hat trick was cool to see. He was great to begin this season, then cooled off, and even though people are down the Flyers, scenes like this are always welcome:

That’s Atkinson’s 7th career hat trick, his first as a Flyer, and actually the second at The Wells Fargo Center. He logged one back in 2018 in a 5-3 Columbus win. This was also Atkinson’s third-multi goal game of the season and 34th of his career. He recorded an assist to boot, giving him a four-point night with a +5 mark overall.

He’s the Flyers’ leading goal scorer, with 12.

“(One thing) we talked about was that we really wanted to have a good home game,” said interim coach Mike Yeo. “We haven’t had one of those in a real long time. So for our fans, and for our guys to play the way they did in front of our crowd, that was big. It’s a good game, and now, what we have to make sure is that, as a coaching staff, we have to make sure is they realize the result came because of their hard work, and I think we have to make sure that they understand how hard we worked in order to have that result, and how hard we need to work for the next game to continue that. If we start to feel a little too good about ourselves, and think that we’re there all of a sudden, then we’ll have a little bit of a reminder that we’re not quite there. If we can look at that work and see what that does for us, and how we look as a team, we bring that and I think we have a chance to continue building.”

Blue liners contribute

One of the nice things was that the defensemen really stepped it up last night. Travis Sanheim and Justin Braun scored. Rasmus Ristolainen and Ivan Provorov each logged two assists.

“A big part of our game is that we want to get back on the offense,” said Sanheim. “That’s how we’re playing better defensively, working together as a group, transitioning quick into playing the opposite zone so I thought we did a good job of that tonight.”

“I don’t think you can have success without your defense being part of the offense,” Yeo added. “What I liked about it tonight was that they weren’t forcing the issue, and you look at the offense that came from our blue-line tonight, a lot of it was literally from the blue-line, it’s not like they were forcing the issue up the ice. They were getting caught in bad positions and they were back-checking. If they are playing the game the right way, the game should be in front of them. I thought our forwards did an outstanding job tonight of playing the game in front of our defensemen, creating turnovers. When that happens when playing in the offensive zone, that’s opening up time and space for them up top. We’re recovering those pucks, getting it to them. I’ll just say that everything is always connected. Your defense is not going to have success without your forwards so it was nice to see that.”

Morgan Frost pulled

One of the weird things about this game was that Morgan Frost left after playing barely more than a minute.

Turns out it was a COVID thing.

“Obviously I thought he had a good start to the game and then I was told that due to COVID-19 protocols that he had to be removed from the game,” Yeo said. “That’s all that I have for you right now. I know that we will have more on him with his status (Wednesday) morning.”

Hopefully there’s no outbreak bullshit coming. The sports world is struggling with COVID right now.