TORONTO — Eight hours before his team took the ice for a pivotal Game 5 against their championship-calibre foe, Sheldon Keefe laid it all out. For his group to get to where they need to go, for them to reach the heights the hockey world believes they cannot, they would need to give all they have.
They would need to push, wave after wave, until there was nothing left, fighting for every single inch.
“By the time you reach this part of the series, it’s really about attrition, more than anything,” the coach had said. “Trying to wear teams down. Trying to get an edge, mentally, physically, when you can.”
On a Tuesday night at Scotiabank Arena, his Toronto Maple Leafs found that edge. It emerged wearing Nos. 88 and 91, as secondary superstars John Tavares and William Nylander came alive when their team needed them most, dragging their squad back from the dead after another nightmarish start threatened to sink them yet again.
Instead, these Maple Leafs showed the type of fight and stubborn indomitability that’s long seemed absent from their DNA, clawing their way back and continuing to push forward until they secured a 4-3 win, and a crucial 3-2 series lead.
“It started in the second,” Tampa Bay Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said post-game, sitting alongside Victor Hedman in the bowels of Toronto’s barn, frustration written across every inch of his face. “You know, obviously we knew they were going to push. You’ve got to give them credit.
“They pushed.”
Through 20 minutes, the only push that seemed to be coming was the one sending the promise of these 2021-22 Leafs into the bin, Toronto once again starting the night on the back foot, and once again getting buried early. By the time they were back in the dressing room mulling over their fate, the Bolts had outshot them 14 to five, had outscored them 2-0, and seemed primed to roll right through them over the next 40, as has been the case for the leading team in every game of this first-round bout.
And then something shifted.
A rare bit of sloppiness from the champs squeaked the door open just a bit, as the Bolts put themselves on the penalty kill with their second too-many-men infraction of the game, their third of the series. After watching Toronto flounder so haphazardly on their first-period cracks at the man-advantage that the Scotiabank Arena crowd broke into chants of “Shoot the puck! Shoot the puck!” Jon Cooper’s side likely wasn’t sweating a turning point.
But three-and-a-half minutes into the second period, one arrived anyways, coming off Nylander’s stick at the top of the right circle, ricocheting off Tavares’s skate at the net front, and floating past the right pad of Andrei Vasilevskiy.
It was just the spark they craved, the Maple Leafs feeding off the sliver of opportunity they’d been granted.
“That gave us life,” Keefe said of the goal. “The crowd really got into it from there. And we didn’t stop.”
That crowd watched as Auston Matthews flew at the Lightning like a bull on a rampage, throwing pucks on net from all angles, battling along the walls, refusing to be held at bay. As Mitch Marner soared through the offensive zone, twisting and turning around Tampa Bay bodies to search out any Leaf with a lane to exploit.
Blue jerseys returned to the bench, others went over the boards, and the fight just continued. Colin Blackwell and Jason Spezza took their turn pouring it on, putting more pucks on Vasilevskiy, and more after that. The crowd swelled into a hum of tension and excitement, waiting for the dam to break, sensing something coming.
A shot from Mark Giordano. Another from Marner, from Ilya Lyubushkin. The Maple Leafs’ young leaders kept throwing their bodies into Bolts any chance they got. Trying to wear their opponent down, trying to find an edge.
As the 40th minute expired, it seemed the Leafs would, at the very least, go down fighting. But they had designs on something greater.
“We talked about, in between periods, just digging in, and needing more,” Tavares said. “Less about the X’s and O’s, but just finding another level. I thought we did a good job of just sticking with it.”
Three minutes into the final period, Nos. 88 and 91 did it again.
With the endless pile of penalties from both clubs leaving things level at 4-on-4, Nylander picked up the puck at his own blue line and started up ice. He stepped to his left and then shifted to his right, setting Alex Killorn stumbling. He offered up the same treatment to Brayden Point, who was forced to watch as the smooth-skating winger swept by him down the right wing. All-world defender Victor Hedman was next — Nylander switched it up for him, faking a shot and instead curling around the net, dropping the puck off for Tavares, posted up behind the goal line.
The captain followed his lead, a feint and a curlback of his own sending Erik Cernak to the ice, opening up enough space for Tavares to whip the puck to a wide-open Morgan Rielly. Quick shot, puck buried, game level.
It was the type of moment the Maple Leafs faithful had been waiting for from Tavares, the type of dynamic sequence from No. 91 that had seemed lost through the first four games of this series. But staring down this pivotal Game 5 earlier Tuesday, Keefe was unwavering in his belief in the captain.
“John’s time is going to come,” he’d said then. By the end of the night, he’d proved prophetic.
Still, the boys in blue weren’t done.
A minute later, Nylander — who came into this game feeling the heat for a lacklustre forecheck the hockey world labelled as character-defining, who had his mettle doubted despite ranking as his team’s post-season scoring leader dating back to last year, who’d been building up to a marquee moment all along — came up clutch.
Taking a pass from Ilya Mikheyev in the Bolts’ zone, the arena crew still announcing Rielly’s goal overhead, Nylander corralled the puck, opened up, and wired a no-doubter past Vasilevskiy’s glove, the shot clanking off the post and in like an audible exclamation mark. From 0-2 to 3-2.
If those on the outside of the Maple Leafs dressing room were surprised to see the two most-maligned members of the club’s core four lead the charge back on this night, they were the only ones. Inside the room, there was no doubt about what their second wave of stars is capable of.
Resident veteran Spezza, who’s seen plenty of the game’s best do their thing over his decades in the league, was making it clear for anyone who would listen just last month, the night Nylander broke his career-best goals mark.
“We all know that when he’s on his game, he’s tough to stop,” the 38-year-old had said then. Tuesday night, Nylander proved him right.
It was far from a two-man effort, though. Go down the list and the names comprising the home side played their part in the comeback effort. Tavares and Nylander grabbed hold of that boulder and started pushing it up the hill. But the team around them joined in, laid hands on it and threw their weight into it too. The fourth line, the third, Jack Campbell giving them every chance from the cage.
And when the defending champions showed some fight of their own, getting a goal from Ryan McDonagh midway through the third to pull things back level, it was Matthews and Marner who finished the job, connecting on a two-on-one tally that had the Scotiabank Arena crowd in such a frenzy, the ground shook.
“It’s everything that you’re looking for,” Keefe said of his core four’s performances once the dust had settled on the victory. “It’s a key time, right? The hardest time of year. Against the back-to-back champs.
“That’s what you’re looking for in big games like this. You need your best people to step up and make a difference. They certainly did that.”
On the wrong side of this series’ first comeback win, Stamkos begrudgingly conceded the same.
“They got big ones from them tonight.”
As is the case with so much of the post-season, though, the true weight of this moment will be determined by what happens next.
The Maple Leafs’ playoff ghosts still hover just overhead, even after a night in which they played with heart. The true test still looms, as the club gets set to march into Amalie Arena for Game 6 on Thursday looking to hand the Bolts their first consecutive loss of this sterling two-year championship run.
A Game 5 win and a series lead make the task at hand no more daunting. But the hope for those watching from afar is that Tuesday’s victory will be looked back on not as a stepping stone to another bout of heartbreak, but as the night these Maple Leafs finally learned to fight back.
“They’re a good hockey team over there. We know they’re going to want to respond and want to push, so we’re going to have to understand that more is going to be required,” Tavares said of where his team must go from here.
“And we’ve got to keep digging in — as a team, individually — to find more. To play at that level. Understanding how difficult it’s going to be to get it done.”
