The Ghosts of Defensemen Past ...

Okay, so you think it's enough that Zdeno Chara is now the captain of the Boston Bruins (who are, in turn, atop the Eastern Conference by 12 points) and that everyone and their brother and their dog can't seem to mention his name without also saying "Norris Trophy" in the same breath?

Well, you'd unfortunately be wrong.

Doug Fischer of The Ottawa Citizen, in an article aptly titled The big one that got away: Would things have been different with the Z?, states that according to Bryan Murray, both he and owner Eugene Melnyk wanted the Sens' then-GM, John Muckler, to find a way to keep both Chara and Wade Redden - and not only that, there was a chance this would actually be possible!

There have been suggestions since that, if the Senators had really wanted to keep Chara, they could have found the money elsewhere.

Before the free-agency period began on July 1, Muckler apparently came close to a deal to acquire goalie Vesa Toskala and two players from the San Jose Sharks for forwards Martin Havlat and Bryan Smolinski.

Had he made the trade, Muckler would not have had to sign free-agent goalie Martin Gerber, freeing $2.3 million per year that could have been applied to keeping Chara.

Look, I used to be a big Gerber fan. HUGE, as a matter of fact. He was a great goaltender in Carolina, and even after he came here and didn't do so well in 2006/07, I still favoured him over and above Ray Emery. Gerbs seemed more gracious somehow, more dignified, and behaved in a manner more befitting an NHL athlete. And, of course, once the whole "Darth Gerber" moniker was added, I couldn't help but continue my fannishness seeing as I'm a bred-in-the-bone Star Wars fan. Match made in heaven, you say? Absolutely!

Except ... well, it wasn't, and every Sens fan worth his or her salt knows how the Gerber experiment ended. I honestly thought he could regain his confidence and become the A-List goaltender we all hoped he had the potential to be, but he didn't, and Murray shipped him out of town as soon as that became evident. Our brief "affair" ended there, and I haven't thought of Gerber much since.

But this hurts. This really, really hurts. Knowing what Chara has done for the Bruins and understanding that we could have kept him hurts, cuts really deep, in a coulda-woulda-shoulda kind of way. Hindsight is 20/20, and I get that, but there's no hiding from the plain and simple fact that Muckler screwed us. He did. Maybe he went for Gerber because the latter had a Stanley Cup ring to his name, but that overlooks the fact that Gerbs hardly ever played the year the Hurricanes won the Cup. He was essentially an untested playoff goaltender, and he did not end up getting us to the Finals. Emery did that.

They say everything happens for a reason. That might be true and it might not. But as a Sens fan who will in all likelihood be on the outside looking in when it comes to the 2009 playoff run, I'm having a tough time seeing that reason.