Regardless of who wins the Stanley Cup, the young Pittsburgh Penguins came of age Monday night in Detroit.
Long, long after the game was over Rick Orpik was still in the "pen" alongside the Zamboni entrance at Joe Louis Arena waiting for his son.
"Probably still has the IV stuck in him," the senior Orpik said of his son, Brooks, the Pittsburgh Penguins’ rock-solid defenceman and one of the truly unsung heroes of their Stanley Cup run. "I think he might have been a little dehydrated out there after awhile.
"That was something special though wasn’t it?"
You think?
Do you think Ryan Malone, who took a wicked slapshot to the face off the stick of teammate Hal Gill wasn’t down a half litre of blood or that Sergei Gonchar’s back wasn’t throbbing with pain as he made his way back from a long sojourn in the locker room to contribute the best he could in limited action on the power play that led to the game-winning goal?
Do you think Rob Scuderi wasn’t spitting out the red stuff to keep from gagging after Juri Hurdler high-sticked him in the face? Do you think Orpik wasn’t doing everything humanly and medically possible to keep himself out on the ice through the fourth, fifth and sixth periods?
Forget about that old story about how these young Penguins needed to follow the path of the long-ago young Edmonton Oilers and learn all about paying the price to win. These kids are beyond that now. They’ve gone to hockey’s version of graduate school and they’ve learned their lessons hard, fast and well.
You could see it all over the ice Monday night at the Joe Louis Arena. The team that refused to lose wasn’t just the veteran Red Wings, the National Hockey League’s best team in the regular season, but also the work-in-progress Penguins. They built a two-goal lead, blew it, battled back to tie the game with 35 seconds remaining in regulation time and with an achingly empty net the only thing watching their back.
Then they went to overtime, a stunning, epic, three-overtimes, hockey’s equivalent of passing through fire and they won it. They won it off the stick of Petr Sykora who finally found his missing game and they won it off a clever setup from Evgeni Malkin who had been carrying the weight of a public perception of failure around his neck like a cow with a clapper-less bell.
And along the way they became a team. Not a team on the rise, not a team of the future, but a championship contending team in the here and now and, to put it as simply as possible. It was a joy to watch.
Goalie Marc-Andre Fleury became not just a former first-round draft pick coming into his own, but a playoff tested goalie who made the kind of saves that allowed his teammates to play with a feeling that they would not lose.
Orpik went from a simple stay-at-home tough guy to the second coming of teammate Gary Roberts in a 27-year-old body.
Sidney Crosby and Jordan Staal proved they had not just learned but mastered the lessons that seem to elude Jason Spezza and Dany Heatley; the idea that team comes before anything else and that winning is something players do for each other, not for the contracts that might await them at season’s end.
That’s what all came into being for the Penguins Monday night.
To be sure, the odds of winning the Cup are in the Red Wings’ favour. Detroit still leads the series, 3-2, and given its performance over the course of 100-odd minutes Monday night, it’s still difficult to understand why they aren’t kissing silver today.
But the Penguins did get what they wanted and what Crosby said coming in was the only thing they wanted; a chance to stay alive, a chance to bring the series back to Pittsburgh, a chance, well, to still have a chance to keep playing for the Stanley Cup.
That’s what’s emerged from all of this. No one on the Pittsburgh side of the Joe talked about coming back from 3-1. No one dared talk about the possibility of winning this thing outright. All they talked about was not losing that game, not seeing their season come to an end, not letting the Red Wings push them aside on the way to the party they would not be invited to attend.
We’ve seen young teams come to this moment before and, more often than not, fail. They fail in part because they are young and because the price becomes too high to pay. They fail when the pain becomes almost too difficult to bear. That’s when they give up.
They don’t mean to and if you ask them they generally can’t even see that they have, but they do. They accept the fact that they are young and buy into the seductive thought that because they are young, their chance will come again, if not this spring, than the next one, or the one after that. Youth always thinks it has time.
This Penguins team Monday night and into Tuesday morning rejected that. Pick the hero you think made it happen. To me it would be Fleury and his stopping 58 shots, the bulk of them after he had surrendered the lead and, late in the game, what appeared to be the Cup as well.
To say he was good is an understatement. To say he was lucky –at least at times—has a ring of truth as clear as the sound Pavel Datsyuk’s shot made when it clanged off the bottom portion of the crossbar.
But to say he wasn’t the difference in the game, the reason his teammates were able to give as much as they did, would be a mistake.
For Fleury this game had the ring of Patrick Roy and his emergence as a force in the NHL’s postseason. It had the feel of those days when a young Martin Brodeur first lifted the New Jersey Devils to a position of power and influence in the game.
Fleury seemed to sense that.
"That was my best game," the 23-year-old said, while seemingly alternating between the fog of exhaustion and the elation of conquest. "It was the longest game I ever played and, I guess, the best…It went pretty well."
It went beyond that, and not just for him but for the Penguins.
"He played the game of his life," said Penguins defenceman Ryan Whitney.
"He was our backbone," added teammate Jarkko Ruutu.
That he inspired his teammates to do the same is what made it special.
It was special for Fleury, but also for the Penguins and for hockey and even Brooks Orpik’s dad.
It’s hard to ask for anything more than that.