‘unbelievable’
the highs and lows of a remarkable final game.
Johnny Boychuk’s eyes were empty windows, and you could see clear through them to somewhere else. He didn’t know what to say. What could he say? “We were just trying to,” he started, then stopped, in a corner of the Boston Bruins locker room, just after the end. “We were just talking about what happened. I don’t know. It’s a shock. I don’t even know what to tell you. This is probably one of the worst feelings you could ever have.”
The Bruins were so close. They were up 2-1 with a little more than one minute left in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup final, on a goal by Milan Lucic. They had unknotted the game with a little over seven minutes left, and they are the Boston Bruins — built to hold up in heavy weather. The Chicago Blackhawks were thinking about Game 7, too, but they had pulled their goaltender. They had a little over one minute, after all.
And Jonathan Toews, who sat out the third period of Game 5 with concussion worries, capped a monster game by ge tting a puck to Bryan Bickell, who was playing with a sprained knee, and Bickell tied it with 1:16 to go, and everyone started rolling up their sleeves for overtime. The Blackhawks put out a defensive line of Dave Bolland, Marcus Kruger, Michael Frolik. “I’d do the same thing,” said Scotty Bowman, Blackhawks senior advisor and hockey legend. “You’re playing to make sure they don’t score.”
But the Blackhawks got the puck in and got it to the point and Johnny Oduya took a shot that deflected, bounced and rattled the post. And there it was for Bolland, a healthy scratch at one point this season. “All I knew was it was sitting in front of me,” Bolland said, “so I had to tap it in.”
Two goals in 17 seconds, and the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. The score was 3-2 in Game 6, but that fails to convey how stunning this was, how chaos reigned. Boston was envisioning a Game 7, a test like no other, and suddenly they were shaking hands.
“I mean, you think you’re going back to Chicago for Game 7,” said Patrick Kane, who was named the winner of the Conn Smythe. “You tie it up, you think you’re going to overtime. And you score 17 seconds later. It’s just an unbelievable feeling. The highs and lows of this game were unbelievable. Unbelievable.” It was familiar, though, if you had been here before. Boston got here with two goals in the final 1:22, 31 seconds apart with their goalie pulled, to escape Game 7 against Toronto in the first round. They came within a bouncing puck of ending that game in regulation, too. This time, the other guys pulled the goalie, scored the goals, won the game on a puck that managed — on a hot and humid night where the ice was dripping and melting and becoming the pockmarked surface of a moon — not to bounce. How it happened again, in the same building, a sideways mirror image, is impossible to say, except to say it’s hockey.
“The total opposite of what happened with Toronto,” Boychuk said.
“In Game 7 we thought we were out. In Game 6 we thought we were in,” said Bruins defenceman Dennis Seidenberg.
“I mean, it’s not exactly the same, but when Boston came back against Toronto — that’s bizarre that you score two goals in the last minute and a half,” said Bowman. And it can change so fast, so inexplicably. Bickell’s goal put them into a sort of shock. They have been through just about everything, this Boston team. They have been through the wars. But they weren’ t ready for that.
“To see the puck go in took a lot of air out of us,” Seidenberg said.
“I mean, I think this team’s as good as any I’ve ever seen at turning the page and getting on with it,” Bruins defenceman Andrew Ference said. “They threw a puck at the net, it hit something high, and got a great bounce. So it’s not a systems fault or an effort fault. It’s just those plays happen. The feeling of loss can co-exist with being proud of yourself and your teammates. Those things don’t have to be one or the other.
“I think the team on the other side is a hell of a team that earned it, but I think they’ll say we gave them as hard a push as anybody could have to win the Cup. If you win it you earn it, that’s for sure, and I think they earned it against us. They absorbed a ton of hits and a lot of adversity, and came through.”
They did. The Blackhawks hoisted the Cup and told the bars in Chicago to stay open and stood on the ice in the near-empty arena with a few hundred Chicago fans cheering for them, surrounded on the ice by their family, their friends. Michal Handzus’s 11-month son was being held by his wife, and the boy was staring around with his father’s blue eyes, wearing a tiny jersey. Bolland’s pregnant wife fell to the ground when her husband scored the goal. Duncan Keith ended an interview by saying, “I want to go find my mom and dad, guys.”
And Kane talked about how all the work was worth it, how when he was a screwup whose mistakes were splashed across the Internet people stuck with him. “Everyone who’s important is here,” Kane said. “I can thank my sisters, my girlfriend, my friends, my parents, and most importantly the Blackhawks, who stuck with me through some tough times, and it’s all worth it. It’s worth the hard work that pays off, the ups and downs, the adversity. It makes me a better person and a better player.”
And on the other side the Bruins were cracked into pieces. They got here through an incredible comeback, an unbelievable confluence of lightning strikes, and that is how it ended.