Down 3-1 to the Penguins, the Senators face the prospect of elimination when their best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinal resume Friday night.

While he would have preferred to talk about resiliency and opportunity on Thursday, Alfredsson was forced to explain his comments following Wednesday’s 7-3 loss to the Penguins. The Ottawa captain had been asked whether it was feasible for the Senators to win three straight games against the Penguins.

“Probably not,” Alfredsson told reporters in a post-game scrum. “I mean, with their depth and power play right now, it doesn’t look too good.”

On Thursday, he admitted his comments were probably taken out of context, but said, “That’s fine, I can handle that.”

“We’re down 3-1 to a very good team and going back to their building and we’re just going to go in there and give them a hell of a game. We’ve always responded really well when our backs are against the wall and this is no different. The good thing is we’re still in the playoffs, it’s not over so we’re going to go in there and give them everything we have.”

Alfredsson said he hadn’t had a chance to read the various news reports or reaction to his comments, but wasn’t overly concerned by how they were being perceived.

“It doesn’t really matter to me which way it’s looked at,” said Alfredsson. “I think the guys in this room know enough about me and I believe in these guys so what’s said and how it’s looked at I’m not going to change anything from what I said.

“It’s pretty obvious to me that we’re in pretty tough and all we can do is focus on (Friday’s) game and give ourselves a chance to come back here for a Game 6.”

Teammates had no issue with Alfredsson’s comments and have no reservations about his belief in the team.

“I think what he was getting at is we’re a team that nobody’s given us a chance most of the year and guys have made the most of it and whenever our back’s been up against the wall we’ve played real well,” said forward Jason Spezza. “We have to go to Pittsburgh and play our best game of the series. We haven’t played our best game yet and hopefully it’s (Friday).”

The Senators’ entire season has largely been based on their ability to overcome adversity and Friday will be their biggest test.

“We have to respond to the level they went to in the last game and we’ll find out tomorrow if in fact we can do that,” said Ottawa head coach Paul MacLean. “It’s going to be a great challenge for us and we look forward to it.”

The Senators had an early lead Wednesday for the first time in the series. But once the Penguins applied pressure, Ottawa started scrambling and turnovers and penalties were the result.

“They’ve been able to start periods way better than we have,” said MacLean. “We need to be ready to play at the start and not ease into it. We have to make sure we’re ready to play.”

Despite being pulled for the second time in the series, Craig Anderson will get the start in goal for Ottawa. MacLean had no issue with Anderson’s play and said there was never a question as to him starting.

“The play of our goaltender allows us to play with a certain amount of freedom, but at the same time we have to play for him too,” said MacLean. “The game (Wednesday) when the momentum swung the other way, it really swung. They made it very difficult for us and they never let off at all.

“They kept going and we couldn’t even get the momentum stopped. We have to come back (Friday) and stop the momentum.”

The Senators will consider making lineup changes for Friday, but MacLean wasn’t ready to say what they might be.

Notes: Mark Stone, who was hit late in the game, is being re-evaluated and his status for Game 5 remains unclear. The Senators did not skate today, but did have player meetings … The Penguins are 0-6 all-time under coach Dan Bylsma when they have a chance to end a series in Pittsburgh.

“I’m just saying we don’t have much going for us,” said Alfredsson after the game. “Maybe that’s the way we like it.”

After considerable criticism, Alfredsson has backtracked on his comments. Today, the Captain addressed the comments.

“Was it taken out of context? Probably.”

“But that’s fine, I can handle that,” explained Alfredsson. “Maybe I should have continued where I left off the answer – I have no doubt one second that we’re going to come out with a great effort tomorrow.”

Alfredsson’s teammates defended their Captain, Thursday afternoon. Jason Spezza told reporters he believes Alfie was misintepreted.

“We’re not worried about Alfie,” said Spezza. “I think what he was trying to say it’s a tall task but if there’s a team that can chip away at it it’s us.”

Meanwhile, the Captain also gained attention last night when he picked up the puck after the game ended – leading to speculation he may have played his last game at Scotiabank Place.

But Alfredsson said there was no significance to taking the puck.

“Could this be my last playoffs or could this be my last season? I don’t know. I don’t collect sticks or keep a lot of memorabilia at home so there’s no speficic reason.”

The Senators face elimination in Game 5 in Pittsburgh, Friday night.

The latest denial is from golfer Sergio Garcia. Asked a joking question about having dinner with his adversary Tiger Woods, Garcia said: “We will serve fried chicken.” He later apologized for what he called a “silly remark,” then added, “but in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner.”

Perhaps the Spanish-born Garcia was unaware that chicken stereotypes have been used for at least a century to denigrate African-Americans. Maybe he was unaware of attitudes buried in his subconscious mind. As the backlash increased, Garcia did apologize further, calling his remark “totally stupid and out of place.”

But by then, he had secured a place on the lengthy roll of people who have offered justifications for statements widely considered offensive.

How can words so hurtful be so easily brushed off? And what does the word “racist” even mean if it doesn’t encompass people who use racial slurs?

“I think it’s human nature that if you’re a racist, you don’t want to admit it,” says conservative radio host Mike Gallagher.

“If Tiger said, ‘Let’s serve tacos at dinner with Garcia,’ the world would go crazy,” Gallagher said. “When a bigot tells a bigoted joke and they get called out on it, the pattern is, I’ll say I’m sorry and maybe it will blow over.”

The pattern is unmistakable. Said golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, after joking that Woods shouldn’t order fried chicken for the Masters champions’ dinner: The comments were “misconstrued.” Said comedian Michael Richards, after responding to a black heckler with a lynching reference and the N-word: “I’m not a racist.” Said actor Mel Gibson, after claiming that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world: “I’m not a bigot.”

The phenomenon has been even more pronounced since Barack Obama became America’s first black president:

—Montana’s chief federal judge resigned after emailing a joke in which a young Obama asks why he is black and his mother is white. The punch line involved a dog. “Although (the joke) is racist, I’m not that way, never have been,” Judge Richard Cebull said.

— After drawing national attention for selling an anti-Obama bumper sticker that said “Don’t Re-Nig in 2012,” creator Paula Smith of Hinesville, Georgia insisted that neither she nor the sticker were racist. She called the uproar “amazing and entertaining.”

— New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino was pilloried for sending an email labeled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” that showed an African tribesman dancing. His response: “I’m not a racist. I’m proud to have created jobs for hundreds of people of every colour and ethnicity.”

— Arizona radio host Barbara Espinosa said she “voted for the white guy” and called Obama a monkey. Asked if that was offensive, she replied, “I’m anything but racist.”

Clay Routledge, a social psychology professor at North Dakota State University who studies the ways people defend themselves against psychological threats, said they often engage in “self-deception”: They may think they’re a good athlete, for example, or have an outgoing personality — or do not have racial biases.

“People have narratives about themselves, self concepts, a whole host of attitudes that they want to think about themselves,” said Routledge. “A lot of times they match well, but sometimes they don’t.”

Other psychologists go further. They blame “implicit bias” — unconscious attitudes based on the way racial groups are commonly portrayed in the public space.

Using scientific studies that measure how quickly people associate words like “black” with “criminal” or “Asian-American” with “foreign,” these researchers conclude that many people — of all backgrounds, not just white people — are unaware of their own racial biases.

Phillip Atiba Goff, a UCLA social psychology professor, says this may be what happened with Garcia: “He was trying to be funny. In the moment, especially if you’re nervous and not thinking, stereotypes come to mind very quickly.”

Goff emphasizes that having an unconscious bias does not mean someone is a racist — it means he or she is a human being who has absorbed ubiquitous information.

So, can a person say something racist but not BE a racist? Might people who make racist statements be telling the truth when they say they are not racist?

Goff says it depends on the individual — but that the rush to brand people as racist obscures the bigger issue of the harm caused by their statements.

“Let’s have a conversation about why (Garcia) said it in the first place, and why these moments seem to come up so much,” Goff said. “We should be able to say, ‘You know what, that was one of those implicit bias moments.’”

Whatever they are called, such moments come up every day for Logan Smith, a journalist who runs the Twitter feed YesYoureRacist. He started about eight months ago, after noticing a plethora of tweets starting with “I’m not racist, but.”

Some of his favourite examples: “I’m not racist but having a black president is just not smart,” ”I’m not racist but black people scare me,” and “I’m not racist but I can see where Hitler was coming from.”

He said most of the tweets seem to come from teenagers: “They didn’t grow up seeing ‘coloreds only’ water fountains, or civil rights marches in the papers, or apartheid on TV, and as a result, many of them simply don’t understand what racism means,” Smith said via email.

“They think that unless they’re actually lynching a black person or something, they’re not racist,” Smith said, “because they don’t understand things like institutionalized racism or inferiorization, and the historical context of their statement.”

Many might not know the ugly history of chicken and black stereotypes.

In the early 1900s, periodicals and postcards commonly displayed images of black people as grotesque, simple-minded “coons” obsessed with chicken and watermelon. From the 1920s to the 1950s, a three-restaurant chain of Coon Chicken Inns was popular around Salt Lake City, Seattle and Portland.

So when people associate black folks with chicken, the past often rushes into the present — as in a famous routine by the black comedian Dave Chappelle.

“A lot of black people can relate to this. Have you ever had something happen that was so racist, that you didn’t even get mad?” Chappelle said.

He then tells a story about walking into a restaurant, contemplating his order with the counterman, and “before I even finish my sentence he says, ‘The chicken!’”

“All these years I thought I liked chicken ’cause it was delicious,” Chappelle said. “Turns out I’m genetically predisposed to liking chicken!”

___

Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. He can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/jessewashington or jwashington(at)ap.org.

___

Online:

Mike Gallagher: http://mikeonline.com

Logan Smith: http://twitter.com/YesYoureRacist

Implicit Association Test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html

Dave Chappelle: http://youtu.be/wJ4B7G8Rw3Q

Court documents show the Internal Revenue Service filed a notice of a lien on the nine-time Grammy Award winner Feb. 7. That was two days before the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul was honoured at a pre-Grammy party in Los Angeles.

Blige and husband Martin Isaacs have a home in Cresskill, N.J., about 15 miles north of New York City.

Court documents show as of the date of the IRS notice Blige owed more than $574,000 for the 2009 tax year, more than $2.2 million for 2010 and more than $647,000 for 2011.

A Blige representative said Thursday she’s working “with her new team to resolve all these issues as quickly as possible.”

Speaking to her newly-elected caucus members as well as defeated candidates for the first time since election night on May 14, Clark says the party must now make good on its election promises.

Those promises include balancing the books and securing markets for the liquefied natural gas industry, an industry Clark has boasted will lift the province out of debt and create tens of thousands of jobs.

Clark also took time to thank all the Liberal candidates who ran in the election, quipping to those who were defeated that she knows what it feels like to lose in their own ridings.

The premier was defeated by the NDP candidate in her riding of Vancouver Point Grey, leaving many to speculate which Liberal MLA might give up their seat so she can run in a byelection.

Clark has said she intends to wait until the final election count before making a decision on how she’ll find a seat again in the legislature.

With the traditional television season concluding Wednesday, CBS claimed the status as the nation’s most-watched network for the 10th time in the past 11 years. Its margin of victory in prime time was wider than any other winning network in 24 years. Rivals make fun of CBS for having an older audience, but this season CBS also won among the 18-to-49-old-demographic that is the financial lifeblood of the industry.

CBS’ “NCIS” was a first-time winner as the most popular television entertainment program.

The “American Idol” streak as the top program ended after nine years. No other show in television history has come close to that.

Benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude for July delivery fell three cents to close at US$94.25 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The price sank as low as $92.21 in the morning after weak manufacturing data from China raised questions about the strength of oil demand in the world’s No. 2 economy.

Global stock markets showed sharp declines amid indications that the U.S. Federal Reserve’s may pull back on its economic stimulus program. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index of shares fell 7.3 per cent.

But U.S. stocks recouped most of their losses by midday, with the Dow finishing the day down just 12.67 points at 15,269.93. Oil traders followed, at one point pushing oil to a small gain.

HSBC Corp. said a preliminary version of its monthly purchasing managers’ index fell to 49.6 for May from 50.4 in April. Numbers below 50 indicate contraction. That sank oil prices because a downturn in energy-hungry China would likely lead to a decline in crude demand.

Ample U.S. supplies of crude oil and refined products such as gasoline continue to weigh on oil prices, even as the summer driving season gets underway in the U.S. with Memorial Day weekend.

“Ahead of the start of the summer driving season, (gasoline) stocks are six per cent up on the long-term average and 10 per cent higher than last year’s level,” said a report from Commerzbank.

Brent crude, a benchmark for many international oil varieties, fell 16 cents to US$102.44 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

In other energy futures trading on Nymex, wholesale gasoline rose one cent to US$2.83 a U.S. gallon (3.79 litres), heating oil lost one cent to US$2.86 a gallon, and natural gas rose eight cents to US$4.26 per 1,000 cubic feet.

(TSX:ECA), (TSX:IMO), (TSX:SU), (TSX:HSE), (NYSE:BP), (NYSE:COP), (NYSE:XOM), (NYSE:CVX), (TSX:CNQ), (TSX:TLM), (TSX:COS.UN), (TSX:CVE)

The lane reductions were originally planned to start Wednesday and were already delayed once until Friday. In a tweet, Thursday afternoon, the City said that the construction would begin Saturday.

The latest delay, like the others, is being blamed on the recent rainy weather.

Once the work finally begins, one lane of the westbound 174 will be closed from west of the Blair Road on-ramp to the split until August.

It’s the start of two years of construction, but the City has added additional buses from Trim Road to downtown during peak morning and afternoon commute times.

Starting mid-June, the eastbound Highway 417 Lees on-ramp will be closed to traffic until 2015.

Closures will increase throughout the summer.

The project includes adding one additional lane added in each direction between Nicholas St. and the split, which will be used by buses replacing the Transitway, while it’s converted to light rail.

Gilles Theberge was a director at Sintra, a construction company that was one of four partners in a cartel that controlled the supply of asphalt around Montreal.

He says they conspired to jack up the price 30 per cent higher than what would have been charged under a free-market system.

He says he quit his company after some dramatic events on June 15, 2000.

Theberge was jolted at 2:45 a.m. by a loud crackling — which was the sound of his car blowing up.

Instead of calling the police first, he says he called his boss to quit and say that the collusion had gone too far.

He says he also called construction magnate Tony Accurso, another member of the alleged four-company asphalt cartel. Accurso, the longtime head of a sprawling construction empire, has come up repeatedly at the inquiry.

He was allegedly also involved in a sewage cartel, according to key witness Lino Zambito, and allegedly had a corrupting influence on politicians, with paid vacations and trips on his yacht. Previous inquiry testimony has alleged that he has Mafia ties.

Theberge says he called his powerful ally to ask if he knew anything about the car bomb. He says Accurso told him he’d heard nothing about it.

The previous day, Theberge and a number of other construction types had gathered at Accurso’s new restaurant in Laval. He says one of the other men, Joseph Borsellino, had asked him if he planned to compete for a $4 million contract in the municipality of St-Laurent.

Theberge recalls replying that it was neither the time, nor the place, to discuss such things. Borsellino made it clear, he says, that Sintra should bow out of the bid.

The men agreed to pick up the discussion at a later point. They never got the chance, because Theberge quick his job immediately after the explosion.

Theberge has shared other anecdotes about how intimidation was used to keep the corrupt system in place.

One time, he says, a Mafia-linked man nicknamed “Mr. Sidewalk,” Nicolo Milioto, came to tell him that the broken window’s at his next-door neighbour’s house were a warning.

He says Milioto told him the intention was to break the windows at Theberge’s own house — “but the guy got the wrong house.”

He says he sometimes received late-night phone calls, with no one on the other end of the line, when a bid was due. He also says another construction boss told him about a bomb placed under his car, too.

Theberge says he concluded that it was generally easier to say yes to his competitors, and recuse himself from a bid, in order to keep the peace.

The former Italian international defender has battled a nagging adductor injury since the third game of the Major League Soccer season, but looks ready to play again.

“He was in good spirits because he was back with the group,” coach Marco Schallibaum said Thursday. “It shows he wants to play, and that experience and quality he has is a big plus for us.”

Schallibaum keeps his starting lineup secret, but Nesta should be back in his central defence pairing with fellow Italian Matteo Ferrari when the Impact (6-2-2) end a 10-day break with a home game against the Philadelphia Union on Saturday night.

They should also have fullback Jeb Brovsky, who has been wearing a mask to protect a nose broken in six places when he went up for a header in a Voyageurs Cup match against Vancouver on May 15.

Montreal remains without defenders Nelson Rivas (knee) and Maxim Tissot (fractured toe), midfielders Davy Arnaud (concussion) and Andrea Pisanu (thigh) and forward Daniele Paponi (thigh).

And defender Hassoun Camara, who helped fill Nesta’s spot on defence, left practice early Thursday. Schallibaum said he was only tired and should be ready to play on Saturday.

The rangy Nesta may have slowed a step as he nears the end of his storied career, but he remains a leader and a presence on the pitch for the Impact.

Just ask Patrice Bernier, the veteran midfielder who works closely with the defence to recover balls and start the attack.

“It’s Alessandro Nesta,” Bernier said. “It’s good for our team that we kept on doing well when he was gone, but he has that aura, that leadership.

“He’s calm on the ball, so it’s not necessary for me to always drop back and get the ball. It allows me to concentrate more on my offensive play and what’s ahead of me.”

Nesta played 19 seasons in Italy with Lazio and AC Milan and made 78 appearances for Italy, including three World Cup campaigns. Considered one of the top central defenders of his era, Nesta was named four times to Europe’s best 11 squad.

Surprisingly, the Impact got him without making him a Designated Player, or one who makes more than the top rate under the league’s salary cap. Nesta said when he joined the club last summer that money didn’t matter and that he wanted to experience MLS along with former Italy teammate Marco Di Vaio, the team’s only DP.

He got into eight games at the end of 2012 and played the first three this season before he was forced to leave a game March 16 against Toronto only 12 minutes in. He returned three games later to face Columbus and Chicago before he was sidelined again for three games.

With Ferrari also missing three games with an injury, Schallibaum was forced to experiment with his back line, with Brovsky and Camara carrying most of the load. Youngsters Karl Ouimette, Wandrille Lefevre and Tissot saw playing time.

But they are glad to have Nesta back.

“He’s a general, not only with his play but he also talks to make sure everybody is focused,” Bernier said. “And it’s nice also to have another (experienced) person because it’s a great 1-2 with Matteo, but when you’re three it’s even better.”

Swiss fullback Dennis Iapichino, whose play has picked up after a rocky start, may remain at left back with Brovsky on the right, unless Camara plays.

A busy week awaits.

After Saturday’s game, the Impact fly to Vancouver for the second leg of their Amway Canadian Championship series. Montreal will then visit Kansas City on June 1.