BOSTON — Milan Lucic is having relationship problems.

See, there’s this girl. Gorgeous girl. Lucic has known her his entire life. She’s sophisticated and enchanting, but grounded. Sure, her disposition turns grey and bleak at times, and she’s expensive to be around. But when she smiles, it’s like all the diamonds in the world are in one place, sparkling for you. Her name is Vancouver.

And lately, she has been breaking Milan Lucic’s heart.

“I never knew it would go this way,” Lucic, the Boston Bruins’ winger, said Monday of the strain he feels toward his hometown. “It does hurt you a little bit. I’m an athlete and have grown up my whole life loving competition. It just happened to be I was on the team that was going up against my hometown team — the team I grew up cheering for — and it went my way instead of Vancouver’s way.

“I wish people could just forget about that when I go home. I’m just a regular person like anybody else.”

Well, not quite, because Lucic makes $6 million a year in the National Hockey League and that kind of money, no matter people say, tilts things. But what really distinguishes him is that he was a forceful part of the Bruins’ team that deprived Vancouver of its first Stanley Cup in a century when it beat the Canucks in the epic 2011 final.

That was the series, Lucic said, when his parents and grandparents were harassed at Rogers Arena.

A year later, vandals defaced the family’s church in East Vancouver. Then seven weeks ago, after the Canucks thumped the Bruins 6-2 in Lucic’s first game in his hometown since the Stanley Cup win, the 25-year-old somehow ended up in front of a Granville Street nightclub in an altercation with a man.

An embarrassing smartphone video of the incident showed Lucic telling police he had been punched twice and bellowing at the alleged assailant: “Do you know who you’re f------ with?”

No charges were laid, but Lucic initially inflamed matters when he told Boston reporters the next day: “I have no reason left to defend my city and the people of my city. I’m just disgusted and outraged that it had to come to something like that.”

That blanket indictment hung for a day before Lucic issued a conciliatory statement: “As I have had more time to think, I want to make it clear that regardless of what has happened, I am still — and always will be — proud to be from there. It is home.”

It wasn’t like this for Andrew Ladd of Maple Ridge or Delta’s Brent Seabrook when the Chicago Blackhawks bounced the Canucks from the playoffs on their way to a Stanley Cup in 2010. Or for Burnaby’s Joe Sakic earlier in the decade when the Colorado Avalanche won its second Stanley Cup and had a rivalry with the Canucks that escalated so dangerously that Todd Bertuzzi ended Steve Moore’s career in 2004.

When former Canuck Willie Mitchell won a Stanley Cup with the Los Angeles Kings in 2012, launching it with a first-round demolition of the Canucks, his day with the trophy was like a civic holiday on Vancouver Island. It was a lovefest. When Lucic brought the Cup home to Vancouver in 2011, he was so wary of inciting Canucks fans or appearing to flaunt the Bruins’ victory that he organized a private party for friends and family atop Grouse Mountain.