SUNRISE, Fla. — This was supposed to be the year.

The year the Stanley Cup finally returned to Canada. The year Connor McDavid etched his name. The year that wasn’t going to end the way the last year had ended.

Someone delivered that script to the Florida Panthers, didn’t they…?

A pretty good story was denied by an even better team Tuesday in Sunrise, as the Florida Panthers won 5-1 in Game 6 to capture their second consecutive Stanley Cup over the Oilers.

And let there be no doubt: Florida was the better team in this series, from the goalie to the defence corps, from the support players to the superstars.

“Their forecheck was great, they tilted the rink,” said a sombre, frustrated Connor McDavid. “They were able to stay on top of us all over the place and we were never really able to generate any momentum up the ice. We kept trying the same thing over and over again, banging our heads against the wall.

“They have great players. How many guys had 20-plus points in the post-season (six)? They’re as deep as it comes.”

This became a story of a Florida team that plays a style of game the Oilers just couldn’t beat.

The Panthers force the game to the walls on the forecheck and make their opponents play a hard, close-in, battle game to exit the zone, which is their forte. Then they clog the neutral zone, not with a passive trap, but aggressively by always moving and angling.

The rugged Panthers owned the net front real estate at both ends of the rink for the entire series, owned the boards, and in the end, own the Stanley Cup again.

“We battled, but we’re not leaving here as winners,” said a dejected Leon Draisaitl, who had two overtime goals in this series but not a single snipe in regulation time. “They were better. Just deeper. I mean, their third line scored how many goals (eight)? It wasn’t their top two lines. Their third line did a lot of damage.”

For Edmonton, big defenceman Mattias Ekholm was never the same after returning late in Round 3 from his core injury. His game was not close to the 24-minute shutdown defenceman he usually is.

So you lose your hardest defenceman, to a large degree, and you enter the series without your hardest forward in the injured Zach Hyman. And then you can’t handle the hardest, grittiest team in hockey, the Panthers.

“We didn’t get to their goaltender enough, either in Game 5 or Game 6,” Ekholm said. “We weren’t able to generate a goal in the first 40 minutes of either game. Give them credit, they’re a good team. But I do think there is another level to our game.”

Another level that Edmonton could not get to in a series that just flowed downhill from puck drop in Game 3 until they awarded the Cup here on a Tuesday night in Sunrise.

McDavid scored one goal — in garbage time of Game 5 — in the entire series, a testament to the game plan executed by Florida, which came as close to eliminating the game’s top player as is humanly possible. Draisaitl could find no space either, and Evan Bouchard created far less than he gave up, in the end, as the Oilers’ three biggest offensive producers were lost in the vortex of Florida’s game.

“I don’t think that’s a fair picture to paint,” Ekholm said. “I don’t think us as D-men were as good as we needed to be. I think the goaltenders probably think that they could have been a little bit better.”

We won’t beat up on Oilers team that has now lost two straight Cup Finals. They’re as good as there is in the National Hockey League right now, but in the unfortunate position of being runner-up to a true champion in Florida, a team in the deepest sense of the word.

“It’s a team sport. If you don’t have everybody firing on all cylinders, it’s hard to win a Stanley Cup,” Ekholm said. “That’s just a matter of fact.”

The Panthers led the series for 255:49, a giant bite compared to Edmonton’s tiny nibble of 33:51. That stat alone says it all, as Florida took control of every first period from Game 3 on, outscoring 10-0 in those four opening frames.

That’s an NHL record for holding a lead in a Final, and it was a psychological barrier for the Oilers, spending two weeks checking a scoreboard that — though the numbers changed periodically — was constantly imbalanced.

The Oilers just trailed in period after period, game after game. And that gets to you, after a while.

“Absolutely,” said goalie Stuart Skinner. “For myself, after every first period, I had let in two goals. That’s hard to take. When you play them consistently, and they’re just always ahead, I mean, it’s a killer.”

A year ago, we sensed sadness in the aftermath of a Game 7 loss in this same, haunting arena. On Tuesday, there was more anger and frustration.

They are well aware of the work it takes to get here, and the breaks along the way that they have both made and received — but squandered just the same.

Everybody says it and it’s true: you never know how many kicks you’re going to get at this cat, at these Cats, and the Oilers have wasted their first two.

“There is still a lot of confidence and belief,” said McDavid, looking to a future that will almost certainly include a contract extension for the Oilers captain this summer. “I don’t think people thought we were going to make it this far. We believed and came up just a little short again.”

It stings, though, to have made this journey twice in 12 months and come away with the ham sandwich both times.

“There is no silver lining to this. It’s heart-wrenching,” head coach Kris Knoblauch said. “It hurts right now, and it’s not going to let up for a while.”