The Devils no longer need to pull off the nearly impossible, digging themselves out of a 3-0 hole. In the practical day-to-day, game-to-game terms they view this Stanley Cup Finals, they now are faced with a 3-1 series deficit. To achieve the former, only the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs would stare back at them in the mirror. To complete the latter, well, the Devils have done that before.

In 2000, they came back from down three games to one to usurp the Philadelphia Flyers from a finals trip they seemed to have assured.

But that Devils team is not this Devils team, a group composed of different players and with its own style. That is a distinction to no less than the pillars of that team.

Only Martin Brodeur, Patrik Elias and Petr Sykora remain from that team and Sykora just returned this season after 10 years away. Larry Robinson, the coach of that team, is on this staff as an assistant.

“There’s only a few guys that lived it,” Brodeur said. “Larry was the coach that made it happen. Again, we were up 3-1 against Ottawa (in 2003) and they came back and we had to win late in Game 7 to go to the Stanley Cup. There’s always a different situation you could look back (on).

“Right now this is a new team, a new circumstance and we’re just going to deal with what we have. Your experience, you can draw from it a little bit, I guess, but again the game is played on the ice.”

Elias was just as assertive.

“Different situation, different guys.” he said. “You could look at maybe a couple of years after that where we still had a couple of guys when we went through different experiences we could have used that.”