Blue Jackets’ resolve knows no bounds in Game 2 win

As the Blue Jackets went about the hard work of eliminating the Toronto Maple Leafs from playoff contention, they were portrayed as barbarians from a far-flung fiefdom. The Canadian ministers of hockey culture were loath to see the beautiful, beautiful Leafs checked into submission. It gave Torontonians the vapors.

The Jackets had about 40 hours of rest before they opened their best-ofseven series against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Tuesday. Game 1 began at 3 p.m. and lasted for six hours. The Lightning prevailed in an all-time epic when Brayden Point scored midway through the fifth overtime.

Surely, the reckoning for the Jackets was at hand.

Goaltender Joonas Korpisalo set a record with 85 saves. Defenseman Seth Jones set a record by playing 65 minutes. The Jackets blocked 62 shots.

Those numbers are mind-boggling. By the time Game 1 was over, the

Jackets had played the equivalent of almost six games in six days, and eight in 10.

Those numbers are unsustainable. The Jackets had 40 hours to rest up for Game 2 Thursday. No way they could recover, right? Their series against Toronto went the five-game route, with two overtime games. They’d lost a fiveot epic against the Lightning. Mentally and physically, they had to be beyond exhaustion, to the point of submission.

Yet the Jackets handled the mighty Lightning and won 3-1 Thursday afternoon.

Against all odds, they tied the series at one game apiece. Jackets fans have come to understand that their team is a resilient group, but this victory put them in another realm. It should not have been possible, not for mere mortals, or even barbarians.

The Lightning had to be thinking,

“What do we have to do to beat these guys?”

The Lightning last year had one of greatest regular seasons in NHL history before getting swept, ignominiously, out of the first round by the Jackets. It was a reckoning for the star-studded Lightning. It compelled them to pad their defensive corps and round out their forward lines with size and toughness.

They shipped out top prospects and first-round draft picks to make these fortifications. To the old Lightning and the new, coach Jon Cooper preached of the glory of discipline and puck protection. It was a franchise-wide response to being out-coached, out-checked and out-moxied by the lowly Jackets.

The Jackets, too, overturned their roster — out of necessity. They lost All-star talents Artemi Panarin, Matt Duchene and Sergei Bobrovsky, along with Ryan Dzingel, to free agency, added just one veteran (Gus Nyquist) and retooled with the beardless. They went on to lead the league with 419 mangames lost to injury.

They had no business being above the playoff line after 70 games, but there they were. Maybe they were telling all of us that they believed in themselves yet. After five months of dark isolation, they went into the Toronto bubble and showed their mettle yet again by rebounding from a horrific Game 4 collapse and beating the Leafs, almost handily, in Game 5.

Still, Game 1 against the Lightning seemed like the beginning of the end for the Jackets. Not because they lost a five-overtime marathon — although that should have been enough, history tells us — but because the Lightning remained as disciplined, defensively sound and mentally tough as the Jackets, for 151 fraught minutes.

The Jackets (minus-7 goal differential during the regular season) and the Lightning (plus-50) have very different margins for error. Thus, Game 1 had the reek of doom for the Jackets. They had to be exhausted. As for the Lightning, they had to be thinking that they had found their redemption.

And then came Game 2, another affirmation of the Jackets’ determination and their dedication to one another.

What do the Lightning have to do to beat these guys?

That is the question, isn’t it?

The Jackets have been described as “bilge” in Toronto. Yet this is a team with Zach Werenski and Jones, with Elvis Merzlikins (wherever he is) and Joonas Korpisalo, with Pierre-luc Dubois and Alexandre Texier and Liam Foudy. They may not be a paragon of aesthetics, but they are not without talent — and they are extraordinarily well-coached.

More, they are a testament to a willpower that can only be summoned in collective. It’s almost mystical.

The mighty Lightning is supposed to win this series. It may yet. First, though, Tampa Bay must believe it can beat a Jackets team that has once vexed them — and appears like a ghost — otherworldly, haunting and clearly undead. And always above the puck. marace@dispatch.com @Michaelarace1