Eventually the shock will wear off.

Eventually, the mourning period will evolve into a summer offseason program and a look to the future.

Eventually, the Bruins will make some decisions on their roster for the 2002-2003 campaign.

Until then, though, there will be plenty of dissecting and second guessing with regard to what went wrong in their first-round playoff series against the Montreal Canadiens.

What everyone agrees upon is that the Bruins were major league disappointments. After finishing in the Eastern Conference's top spot with 101 points during the regular season, the team was selected by many observers to be the odds-on favorite to make it to the Stanley Cup finals.

Legitimate choice? At the time, it sure seemed like it. All year long, players such as Bill Guerin and Martin Lapointe were touted as substantial leaders who were going to guide the squad to respectability first and a championship next. They knew how to win and they were going to translate that to everyone else in the dressing room.

Then there was the Byron Dafoe factor. Former Bruins' coach Pat Burns was ushered out the door despite the fact he didn't have a healthy No. 1 goalie. Dafoe, who was fully recovered from knee and hamstring injuries, had all last summer to prepare himself for the season. The result was a career-high 35 victories. The one beauty of the Bruins during the regular season, or so they thought, was that they were getting contributions from everyone. That meant Dafoe wasn't going to have to carry the day in order for the team to win. But a funny thing happened on their way through the postseason. In the first couple of games, Dafoe was outstanding, but his defensemen were dreadful and his forwards weren't much better. There were shifts and occasional periods when the Bruins pulled it all together, but they were few and far between. Dafoe too often played as if he was backstopping a group of teammates who were playing together for the first time. Too often, the Bruins' own zone looked like a train wreck.

Many around the team believe Dafoe, who is set to become an unrestricted free agent on July 1, will be playing for another team next year. General manager Mike O'Connell said the club's decisions on how to proceed certainly will be impacted by how they finished, which does nothing to dispel that belief.

"When something like this happens, you've got to let yourself feel it, find out why it happened, see what needs to be fixed and then fix it," said O'Connell.

As the regular season proceeded, the one constant Achilles' heel for Boston was the lack of offense generated by the defense. That wasn't as noticeable as it might have been were it not for high-powered forwards such as Brian Rolston -- who was the Bruins' MVP of the playoff series -- Sergei Samsonov, Glen Murray, Joe Thornton and Bill Guerin.

In the playoffs, the blue line corps too often looked tired and confused. Night in and night out, rookie Nick Boynton was its best, and with all due respect to the terrific first-year player, that fact is nothing short of alarming. The forwards weren't in sync with the defensemen for much of the series and Montreal's extraordinary speed exploited all of their weaknesses.

So, after a little while, after the shock wears off, the evaluation will begin.

Will Bill Guerin be back next year or will he cash in as unrestricted free agent in some other city? Will the Bruins take a dive into the free-agent pool this summer as they did last year when they wooed Lapointe with a $20 million contract?

Dealing with human beings is an inexact science. The Bruins thought they had a formula to bring a Stanley Cup championship to Boston for the first time in 30 years. But the Canadiens exposed them as pretenders.

During the regular season, the Bruins lacked a killer's instinct. When they had an opponent down and needed one goal to close them out, too often they didn't get it. In the postseason, that was even more evident. In Game 3, the Bruins had a 3-1 lead going into the third period and wound up collapsing -- a customary event as Montreal scored 10 of its 20 goals, including three of its four game winners, in the final stanza.

"When they got up, 2-1, it was scary how they could just clog us up and not allow us to get out of our zone," said Dafoe. "We were trying to get me out of the net for the last two minutes and we couldn't get it out of our zone let alone get me out. That's not a knock on our guys, they were working so hard, it's just that it's a real compliment to what those guys do with a lead."

The way the Canadiens played, with great desperation and passion, not to mention Jose Theodore's goaltending, was how everyone thought the Bruins would play. They had all the ingredients, after all, right? Wrong. In the end, it was the Canadiens who had what it took.

"We wanted it bad," said Dafoe, "but they wanted it just a little bit more."

And that may prove to be the most damning thing of all.

Nancy Marrapese-Burrell of the Boston Globe is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.