PITTSBURGH – Guy Boucher remembers. “It still hurts, I’ll be honest with you,” he says 2,188 days after the fact. “That’s the non-excitement part of it.”
Game 7. Sixty minutes, and perhaps a few more, to decide who plays for the Stanley Cup.
There’s magic built into that equation because every single person with a stake in the outcome has literally spent time in a driveway or basement dreaming about a chance like this, and now it’s at hand. But … there is also a but.
“I look back, you know, it was the Boston Bruins back then,” said Boucher, the Ottawa Senators coach, of his previous dance across a tight-rope with no safety net. “It was a tough game. It was 0-0 with seven minutes left in the game. It was quite a game and a lot of pressure. What I remember most is the excitement of an opportunity that very few people get in their lives, and I’m part of that.
“I can’t be blessed more than that.”
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That’s how the Senators felt coming into Pittsburgh for one last shot at the defending champs. Blessed. They have had a crazy season – one marked by personal torment and collective triumph – and it’s all on the line Thursday at PPG Paints Arena.
They have just absorbed Pittsburgh’s fiercest punch and lived to tell the tale. The Penguins controlled 63.53 per cent of even-strength shot attempts in Game 6, their second-highest total in the last 100 games, but could only get one of the 46 shots on net past Craig Anderson. Evgeni Malkin played like a man possessed and then expressed frustration about being denied.
“We did a lot of good things and we probably deserved better,” said captain Sidney Crosby.
“Anderson had a big night,” observed goaltender Matt Murray. “If not for him, I think it’s a different result.”
The result, in this case, would have meant a tussle with the Nashville Predators and a chance at going back-to-back. Now, who knows? That’s the thing about a Game 7: Pittsburgh might control the run of play yet again and get stymied.
Or perhaps Ottawa will make good on its plan to “bore them out of the building,” as Clarke MacArthur so eloquently put it, and let’s not forget the Senators already did that once here in Game 1.
A lot of this rests on the shoulders of Anderson, who at age 36 was the fourth-oldest man to stop pucks in the NHL this season. The 23-year-old Murray, by comparison, was the second-youngest to do it on a full-time basis. Only one of them has time on his side.
“When you get to be a guy my age you run out of next years,” Anderson told reporters in Ottawa before boarding the team plane on Wednesday afternoon. “As much as you’d love to say there is always next year, you can ask every single player that’s been in my position: The ticking time clock, it ends.”
We will see an Eastern Conference Final decided in Game 7 for the third straight spring. Jon Cooper’s upstart Lightning shocked the New York Rangers 2-0 at MSG in 2015, before Pittsburgh had to squeak out a 2-1 win over Tampa last May despite owning a 39-17 edge on the shot clock.
Even as the teams change, and the players change, and the venues change, these games are almost always tight. One bounce, one way or the other.
Boucher lived it with a previous incarnation of the Lightning, which went into the belly of the beast at TD Garden in 2011 and kept the score 0-0 through 52 minutes against the best Bruins team of this generation. Then Nathan Horton broke free and scored a massive goal for the eventual Cup champions.
“We had a guy fall down,” Boucher said Tuesday night, the details still fresh.
The parallels between that Lightning group and this version of the Senators extend far beyond the man standing behind the bench. Both leaned heavily on a star and punched well above their weight class. Both found such buy-in to a stout defensive system that they built an unshakeable belief.
As much as Erik Karlsson carried Ottawa through Rounds 1 and 2 this spring – with hairline fractures in his left foot, no less – a new formula has been needed in Round 3. The captain hasn’t single-handedly tilted the ice against Pittsburgh, not to the same degree as before.
He even acknowledged being tired after Tuesday’s game, which is a little like Superman saying he needs to take the occasional day off to launder his cape.
That’s why everything begins and ends with Anderson, a man who has performed super human feats of his own this season. He took a personal leave for two months while his wife, Nicholle, went through chemotherapy for a rare form of throat cancer.
He’s largely been apart from her and their two sons during this playoff run while she’s received additional treatment in Florida. It can’t be easy.
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Anderson is arguably one of the more under-appreciated goalies in the league – his .922 save percentage since Ottawa acquired him in December 2011 is second only to Carey Price’s .924 in that time – and he was a big draw for Boucher when he accepted a position with the Senators last summer.
“If I didn’t have a No. 1 goalie, I didn’t want the job,” said Boucher. “I’ve lived it for quite a few years, and it’s hell when you don’t have it because everything you do turns to darkness. … It’s always going to start with the goalie for me because I’ve been humbled enough now in situations where you can play great and you just can’t win.”
They will arrive at the arena on Thursday night believing they can win.
Nothing about the six games in this series so far has changed the fact that Pittsburgh is considered heavy favourites, but even when the Senators were beaten 7-0 here three days ago they had private conversations about how this remained a best-of-seven they were destined to win.
“We didn’t put a nice suit on today to come get a loss,” said MacArthur.
“I mean, you never know what could happen,” added winger Mike Hoffman. “Andy could save them all, and we could score one short-handed. It’s a game of hockey.”
One that will stay with them no matter what happens next.
