Off-key Hawks need to fine-tune their game and come out on top

Sweep Dreams, Baby?

Uh, not so much anymore.

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad?

Yeah, that's the name of that tune.

And that's just what the Blackhawks face tonight after dropping a pair to the Philadelphia Flyers on the road to even the Stanley Cup Finals at 2-2 heading into tonight's ultra-important Game 5 at the United Center.

But if the Hawks come out with the same old song and dance routine they used on the road against the Flyers - taking too many undisciplined penalties, having too breakdowns in their own end and being unable to match Philadelphia's intensity for a full 60 minutes - it might prove costly.

Because everything is on the line tonight as the Hawks try to hold onto their hard-earned home-ice advantage.

"It's a huge challenge," Kris Versteeg said.

"It goes without saying," Hawks forward Patrick Sharp said. "We still have yet to play our best game. But we're still a confident group. That swagger is still in this room."

And the players aren't expecting - nor do they need to hear - any Knute Rockne speeches before this one.

They know what's at stake.

"I'm pretty sure Johnny (Toews) is going to say something before the game," Tomas Kopecky said. "But not much needs to be said. It just needs to be done on the ice, so go out there and execute."

The Hawks didn't practice Saturday, instead meeting as a team to go over film from the games in Philadelphia. And coach Joel Quenneville told his team, in no doubt PG-13 or worse terms, some of the things he didn't like.

Starting with ...

"Penalties for sure," Patrick Kane said. "And then just making sure we want it. You don't want to let this opportunity slip away, especially coming all this way.

"We can really put something together here that a lot of us can cherish for the rest of our lives. We don't want to let the opportunity slip away."

"We definitely thought we could've taken a little better advantage of those two games in Philly with the efforts that we had," Andrew Ladd said. "At the same time, if you asked us at the start of the year if we'd have a best-of-three for the Stanley Cup, we would have taken that."

Well, that's just where they are now, and it's not as if they are panicking, thanks in part to the team's veteran leadership.

"There's guys here who have been through the playoffs before - we know what we need to do," defenseman Brian Campbell said. "I know I faced Philly when I was with Buffalo. We won the first two at home and lost the next two and went on to win in six.

"Our goal is to come out and win the hockey game."

That means crashing the Philadelphia net, and not just Dustin Byfuglien. That means equaling Flyers defenseman Chris Pronger's intensity; the clean shaven Pronger has been one hairy beast this series.

"Whether it's Buff against Pronger, whoever is against Pronger, I think that's something we'll see if that will be a matchup going forward," Quenneville said in response to Mike Milbury's assertion that Big Buff has played "timid" this series compared to previous series. "We still want to be hard against him. We still want to make him turn and make him play defensive and make him play from the back end.

"He's what he is. We have to be more physical and we have to be harder on him and make it tougher."

And in the end for the Hawks, it means outscoring the pesky Flyers by whatever means necessary.

"They seem to be kind of clicking on all cylinders and playing some good hockey," Ladd said. "But at the same time, they haven't seen our best."

If they do, a few more bars of Chelsea Dagger would be music to a lot of Hawks fans' ears right about now.