ST. LOUIS — Cody Eakin had a plug up his left nostril, and a big, sloppy grin on his face. He looked like a red-headed Sly Stallone coming off the ropes in the late rounds, and had the knockout punch to show for it.
“It was a bit of an ugly game,” he began, which fits nicely considering the source. “They had momentum for a lot of it, but we stuck with it, got some great saves, and towards the third we started getting some momentum, getting our feet going.
“Maybe stuck to it a little longer than they did.”
That quote about sums up what you could aptly describe as an Oreo cookie of a second-round series. Dallas has had the thin parts at the start of Game 1 and the end of Game 4, but St. Louis had all the tasty bits in between.
Now, after Eakin’s top-shelf beauty won Game 4 just 2:58 into extra time, the Stars are back in the catbird seat, as they used to say in these parts. We’re all tied at 2, and the league’s No. 2 and 3 teams from the regular season will embark on a best-of-three that begins Saturday afternoon in Texas.
On Cinco de Mayo, of course, the score added up to five: 3-2 for Dallas.
“We were embarrassed in Game 3,” said Stars coach Lindy Ruff of a 6-1 loss. “I said it’s time for us to man up, and I thought we did. I thought our leaders were our leaders. I thought Jamie Benn was great again, and I thought some young guys played really well.
“Once we got by the first 15 minutes, we had everybody aboard.”
“We didn’t have enough,” spat Blues captain David Backes. He was right.
What has become evident in this series is that Dallas wants to run and gun, scoring off the rush whenever possible. They want three-on-twos and two-on-ones, and if they get to 35 shots they’ll likely walk away happy.
St. Louis? They want to pin the Stars in their own zone, then capitalize on their ability to strip pucks, win battles, fire point shots and tip pucks home. Their game is a heavy one, while the Stars are more skill and style.
“We’re not going to beat them at their game,” observed Blues coach Ken Hitchcock, “and they’re probably going to struggle at our game.”
Game 4 teetered back and forth between the two styles, but St. Louis came out loose when Joel Edmundson handed a puck to Radek Faksa for a freebie to tie the game at 1. Just 69 seconds later, with Backes in the box, the Stars scored their first power-play goal of this series to take a 2-1 lead.
“We didn’t bury them when we had the chance. We let them off the mat with those two quick goals,” Hitchcock said.
The Stars power play is a dam that had better not be bursting on the Blues, who held Dallas — hockey’s highest scoring team — to a goose egg in their first 12 power plays of the series. The other element of this Stars team that you can only hold down for so long is Jamie Benn, who was on a mission in a game his team absolutely had to win.
Moments like this are when the truly great players play, and Benn showed up at puck drop Thursday with ill intentions. He ended the night with two assists in 24:15 of ice time, and left no doubt in anyone’s mind why he wears the C in Big D.
The guy oozes leadership, and wasn’t all that interested in talking about his own game after this one.
“The message was, ‘Stay positive, get back at it.’ We know we’re a good team,” he said. “We finished where we did because of the way we played throughout the year, and we believed in each other.”
We’re in this one deep now, folks, two games apiece and hurtling towards a likely Game 7 in Dallas on Wednesday.
Two real good teams here. Why would we expect anything less?
