Each playoff series is, well, a series of little game scores that carry varying degrees of meaning, emotion, anxiety and weight in the days between games even though they all ultimately amount to the same thing.
A 2-2 series feels different if you began 0-2 than if you began 2-0, vs. if it went 1-1, 2-1, 2-2, but no matter how you spin the journey, at that point you’ve reduced things to a best of three. And sometimes you can look at how the games were played and put temporary blinders on the series score, like “You know we were lucky to be up 2-0 with how we played those first two games; I feel better about our game now even though we lost Games 3 and 4.