Having been outscored 12-1 in the past two ice hockey matches and now tied in the series at two games apiece. That dead quiet you hear on the West Coast tonight is the shocked silence of hard core Canucks fans and the vacuum of tens of thousands of bandwagon fans who have suddenly disappeared.

This was the scene exactly 1 hour after the Game three loss on the streets of Vancouver. Can you see all the little people in the street looking bored and wishing they had someone to pepper spray into another dimension? That’s the Vancouver Police, employed at great expense by the City of Vancouver to control the throngs of fans who showed up after wins in Games 1 and 2.

They were expecting Mardi Gras after Game 3 and instead got a live version of that show Life After People.

Somewhere in the last two games the Canucks have fumbled their opportunity to be Canada’s team and the Canucks and their fans are getting ripped to shreds on websites, blogs and in the twittersphere all over the world. Many fans can’t figure out why.

Here. We will give you our best guess.

We consider ourselves to be a die hard fan of the Edmonton Oilers. As such our joy-misery experience can be best demonstrated with the graph above. We would literally give both of our eyes and one of our legs for the Oilers to have just blown a 2-0 2011 Stanley Cup series lead. We would kill any number of people just to get the Oilers to be swept in a single round.

Things are so dire of late that we actually tweeted Oilers D Ryan Whitney who indicated he was at the game in Boston tonight, telling him to "soak in the atmosphere so you will be ready for big Oilers playoff games soon."

What kind of loser does this sort of thing? The kind of loser that needs to keep hope alive by any means necessary.

From the impossibly ignorant move of relighting the Olympic Flame on behalf of Canada to having only ghosts in the streets three games later. How can a City run so hot and cold at the exact same time? It is this idea of bandwagon jumping apathy mixed with the high handed belief that you are "Canada’s Team" that is driving so many into the waiting arms of the Temporary Boston Bruins fans.

Part of the fun of living and dying with a hockey team is that you earn your dizzying highs by experiencing many terrifying lows. You are with them for the ups and the downs all the way through and that is the experience that makes a die hard fan.

There are tons of hard core Canucks fans we have encountered on twitter and in real life who are in complete shambles tonight. Good hard working types who can recall struggling through the days of Corey Hirsch and Ed Jovonovski in the hopes that the Canucks would one day win the Cup.

They remember the failed Mark Messier experiement when Veteran leadership was brought in at an extremely high cost to put the team over the top in the late 1990s only to see an expensive trip to the bottom of the NHL.

Now here they are in what should be their finest series in the past 17 years and they are spending half their time defending their team and half their time defending their fellow fans.  These folks deserve a Cup more than a great many hockey fans in Canada. 

Besmirched by the newly minted Canucks fans that show up by the tens of thousands only to disappear into the ether hours later, they deserve better than this. The City of Vancouver – arguably one of the finest places in the world – deserves better than this.

Hell even the Vancouver Canucks deserve better.

Enough is enough fair weather Canucks fans. Don’t run away into your million dollar condos, fresh fish restaurants and movie sets. Come out into the streets and support the Canucks on the eve of an absolutely monumental Game 5.