TOUGH END TO SENS’ STORYBOOK PLAYOFFS
Love.
The word sounded a tad odd, coming out of the Ottawa Senators dressing room only a few minutes after the end came with a thud, three minutes shy of midnight Thursday.
Yet that’s where Senators goaltender Craig Anderson went when asked about how he would remember the season that finished on the Chris Kunitz “knuckle puck,” the one shot that left the Sens one shot shy of a berth in the Stanley Cup final.
“Love,” he said, his voice breaking slightly. “The love for the guys in here. Right from the day I left the team to the day I came back. I wouldn’t ask for better teammates than the guys this year.”
Anderson’s personal situation was a central theme — perhaps the central theme — in a year where a series of unfortunate events ended up pushing the Senators onward and upwards.
He missed extended portions of the season to be with his wife, Nicholle, in her fight with a rare throat cancer, meaning backup Mike Condon needed to carry the load through December and January.
Nicholle Anderson, too, weighed in on Twitter when it was done.
“A year you would think I would want to forget, but I couldn’t be prouder of our team,” she wrote. “Great year and memories that will last a lifetime.”
Anderson, who turned 36 on the night of Game 5 against Pittsburgh, fully recognizes that his days in the NHL are running out. Chances are he’ll never experience a run deep into the third round of the playoffs ever again.
For all the rough stuff that occurred in the regular season, the post-season was full of signature moments.
Twenty seconds after falling behind 1-0 in the second period Thursday, they tied the game. Three minutes after going behind 2-1 in third period, they evened the game again.
The Senators had already won six overtime games. They seemed destined to win a seventh — and go on to seventh heaven and a matchup against Nashville in the final.
“It’s just that I thought it was meant to be,” Anderson said. “I thought it was our time. You need a little bit of luck on your side. A lot of things need to go right. It just didn’t fall for us.”
The Penguins outplayed the Senators in overtime, but time and again, Anderson made the big save and/or the Penguins put pucks off posts and pads.
When the winner came, off a change-of-pace Kunitz shot following a superb setup by Sidney Crosby, Anderson didn’t see it coming. Jean-Gabriel Pageau was only inches away from blocking the shot, but the puck caught the top of the net.
“It was a knuckle puck, end over end,” Anderson said. “A perfect shot, a little bit lucky, too, because it was a knuckler. I don’t see it come off his stick. I’m just making myself as big as possible, hoping for the best. It didn’t work out.” Then the disbelief set in. “Shock, I think, at the moment,” Anderson said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s happening, but it is. We played our hearts out. We gave everything we had. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We laid it out there. Put it on the line. The guys were dead tired out there. It just wasn’t in the cards for us.”
Anderson himself had a few ups and downs in the playoffs, allowing four goals in the first period of the atrocious Game 5 in Pittsburgh.
Yet he followed that up by showcasing the mental toughness of an elite goaltender. Without Anderson, there’s no way the Senators would have won Game 6 at Canadian Tire Centre. Without him, the Senators had little chance of taking the Penguins to overtime in Game 7.
He was, simply put, superb with the season on the line.
Then he summed up the season with the appropriate words for his surprising squad.
“Disappointment,” he said. “We’re all disappointed. But there’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all should be proud of the way we played and battled.
“We weren’t supposed to be here. We weren’t supposed to do this. Inside this room, we believed we could achieve anything if we put our mind to it. With a little bit of puck luck, maybe we’re still standing.” kwarren@postmedia.com twitter.com/ Citizenkwarren