Thursday night’s Penguins-Flyers Game 6 had a hypnotic effect after a while.

It was nearly 80 minutes of 0-0 hockey, but with innumerable huge saves, gorgeous scoring chances, turnovers, odd-man rushes, clean looks, deflected shots, near misses, gasps, shrieks and groans.

The constant flow of failed high-danger attempts lulled me into a sense of scoring being impossible, even though there was a scoring chance on almost every shift. I was stunned to look at the box score and see that Penguins goalie Arturs Silovs only had 31 saves. It felt like 61, and all of them were memorable.

Perhaps the best of the bunch was his last one. The one where he lost his stick in the crease and even the stray lumber made a save on its own, and Silovs managed to control the loose puck with his blocker hand.

“He was great,” Penguins captain Sidney Crosby said on SportsNet Pittsburgh after the game. “They were going to push hard, and we were gonna have to rely on him. He made some big saves and kept us in it. It was kind of trading momentum there. But, for the most part, in the second half of the game, I thought we did a pretty good job of generating some good looks ourselves.”

For the final 35 minutes or so of that contest, my brain started to wander into fantasy land. We were all able to cease fixating on who was punching whom after the whistle, and which team was doing a better job of facewashing the other in scrum after scrum.

The typical Penguins-Flyers nastiness faded into the background, and the focus turned to who would be the hero. The Penguins controlled enough of the play that I was anticipating which Penguin would join the ranks of Chris Kunitz, Nick Bonino, Petr Nedved, Darius Kasparaitis, Marty Straka and Petr Sykora.

Who was going to etch themselves in Penguins’ overtime lore, and how were they going to do it? Sidney Crosby shoving it down Philadelphia’s throat again with a tricky deflection? Evgeni Malkin rewinding the clock with a hammer slapshot? Elimination game Bryan Rust, cutting back across the grain and finishing off a backhand?

No, instead, it was Cam York, a Philadelphia defenseman with four goals on the season. He ended the series moments after Silovs’ stick channeled its inner Ken Dryden.

Now, instead of adding a Penguin name to that previous list of Pittsburgh overtime playoff heroes, it is York who joins a different kind of list which includes the likes of David Volek, Tom Fitzgerald, Keith Primeau and Evgeny Kuznetsov.

Guys whose walk-off goals ended playoff games and/or ended seasons.

And it was something about how York celebrated after he scored to win the game 1-0. Something about how he threw his stick into the crowd while skating up the boards.

I noticed the orange jersey and black pants again. My eyes got stuck on the logo. I was sucked back into real world.

Not only did the Penguins lose this game, but they lost to … them.

That momentary escape from the hang-up of who the opponent was disappeared.

This wasn’t just a painful loss. This was a kick in the groin from … them. The Flyers.

“We probably played our best game of the series,” defenseman Erik Karlsson said. “They bent, but they didn’t break, and that’s why they’re moving on to the second round. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have more in us. But, hopefully, it’s something that we can build on going into next year.”

The unique nature of that game, the flow of it, pulled me away from the haunting reality that I had going into it.

The Penguins hadn’t won four games in a row since late January. The Flyers hadn’t lost four in a row since late January. Even if the Penguins got this series — which had been 3-0 Philly at one point — back to Pittsburgh, how were they going to be able to fully “flip-the-script” and become just the fifth NHL team ever to reverse an 0-3 start in a series?

The Penguins played well enough for the most recent nine periods of hockey to close within 3-2 of the series with overtime looming in Game 6. Belief was starting to bubble. But the Penguins didn’t lose this series because of York’s game-winner, or the first crack in the wall from Silovs all night.

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The Penguins lost this game and the series for the same reasons they dropped the first three games. The power play was inconsistent. The middle six forwards were absent. They took a retaliatory penalty. Too many odd-man breaks were yielded and sloppy turnovers were committed. Short-handed chances were allowed. They couldn’t finish looks and ignited breaks the other way because of missing the net.

All these issues were present at some point during Thursday night’s game as well. Silovs just kept erasing them.

“I felt pretty loose,” Silovs said. “I like these games. I love when there is so much at stake. It’s always entertaining to play, especially in Philly. They’re hating us, booing us. That’s so much fun to play.”

Did the Penguins make a mistake by not playing Silovs earlier in the series? The numbers will suggest so. He was better (2-1, 1.52 goals-against average, .939 save percentage) than Stuart Skinner was (0-3, 3.08, .873).

But who could’ve seen that coming? Skinner was superior to Silovs down the stretch of the regular season, and Skinner was much better in those three games than those stats indicated. He played well enough in Games 1-2 to at least keep them close, and maybe win them.

We shouldn’t be concerning ourselves with why Silovs was better than Skinner anyway. We should be concerned with why Philadelphia’s Dan Vladar was better than both of them four times in six tries, and why the Penguins couldn’t make him look human more often.

The 28-year-old Flyers netminder stopped 42 shots in the Game 6 shutout, and 148 of 158 in the series.

“Game to game, things change,” Pens coach Dan Muse said of his team’s offensive struggles. “I think early on, it was really tight. There’s not a lot of space at all. I think the games, especially these last couple, things opened up a bit. For both teams, you saw the different types of chances that maybe you didn’t see as much early in the series. I think that’s part of it. As the series goes on, every game could be a little bit different.”

But they weren’t. The results are what they are, and the Penguins’ problems throughout the series were consistent enough that they are going home now, and the Flyers are advancing.

Philadelphia is a young team that’s getting better. The Penguins are a club in between, trying to figure itself out. That was always going to be the case, whether they pulled off this historic comeback attempt against the Flyers or not.

It just would’ve been nice to delay that reality for a little while longer as well.