Game Two Recap (Penguins 5, Senators 3)

Halfway through the second period of tonight's game the Penguins were leading the Senators 2-0, had already recorded forty shots on goal and were killing a penalty pretty effectively. As the penalty expired, Malkin dove out on his belly to block a pass in the slot and skittered the puck to Brooks Orpik, who had stepped out of the penalty box and was ready for the obligatory breakaway. Orpik has had an up-and-down season that reached its low point when he was assigned to the gulag of playing left wing, but he's emerged as a guy who has a lot of tangible and valuable skills that will keep him employed for the next several years. Unfortunately, offense isn't one of them, so as he skated in toward Martin Gerber I thought about how Mellon Arena would literally come down if he lit the lamp. Sadly, Gerber closed the five hole and rebuffed him, but on the ensuing play as some hapless Senator was trying to skate the puck out of his end, Ryan Malone stood him up at the blue line with a great check and slid the puck to Malkin, who faked the slap shot and fired a perfect pass to Petr Sykora. Sykora is physically incapable of missing a one-timer set up as pretty as this one was, and the goal, his third in two games, made everybody in the building think the series would likely end up a four-game cakewalk where the Senators might not even score a goal.

We shoulda known better. The Penguins' defensive positioning and backchecking had shut down the Senators' perimeter passing and play-setting, so Ottawa started sending a bunch of guys to the Penguins' net to try to get rebounds off shot/passes. It worked to the tune of a tie game by the ten-minute mark of the third period. Can you imagine the lift it would have given the Senators to have left with a win after being down by three halfway through, after being outshot by twenty-five shots and being held without a goal for the first game-and-a-half? Yeah, I didn't want to imagine it either. Imagine, instead, the demoralizing effect of making such a valiant comeback only to take a dumb and unnecessary penalty with 1:13 left in the third period to give the Penguins a power play. That power play, of course, led to the goal that left Gerber prone on the ice for about ten seconds, as seen above. By game end, the Penguins had a significant disparity in power plays, owing to some untimely indiscipline on the part of Chris Phillips and Martin Lapointe, in particular. I'm sure that disparity will play out in the form of some evening-out in games three and four, but the home team still has its two-game advantage.

My dad scored two tickets to the game as a belated birthday present, and our seats in F balcony were directly above where Ryan Malone swooped around the Ottawa net and stuffed in the winning wraparound. If I'd forgotten a little in the past few years, I was instantly reminded of why I love the NHL in general, and the playoffs in particular. The first playoff game I saw in person was Mario Lemieux's 5-goal, 3-assist whomping of the Flyers back on April 25, 1989, which guaranteed I'll be a Penguins fan until I stop drawing breath. It didn't look like anything could stop them after that game. That ended up being the last game the Penguins won in the '88-'89 playoffs. My second playoff game attended was a 7-2 drubbing the Penguins suffered in April 1992 at the hands of the Washington Capitals. That loss put them down 3-1 in their first-round series and led to them being written off by everybody with an opinion. They won fifteen out of their next seventeen on their way to the Stanley Cup. And every game it's a different hero. That's what I've missed since the team's last prolonged playoff run seven years ago, but it looks like it might be back. Two games, two heroes.