Surprise! Canucks crumble in OT thriller
If you’re lucky, every once in a while you see something seemingly impossible happen, something extraordinary.
If you were watching the Canucks on Saturday, you saw such things happen several times.
It was a game that started with a Vancouver lead and should have ended with a Jonathan Toews overtime goal. But it was overturned on review. When does a call like that ever go Vancouver’s way?
It didn’t matter in the end, as Marian Hossa ended the most exciting overtime ever played here to give Chicago a 4-3 win.
It was the night the Canucks shocked the world and then Chicago shocked them right back.
These days, it’s not hard for the Canucks to surprise people. A first-period goal will do it. And so will a lead. The Canucks got both and did it against the Blackhawks, of all teams.
Vancouver added a power-play goal and a short-handed marker, too. Somehow, they built a 3-0 lead, and for a brief moment in time, the fog that’s engulfed this team for much of 2016 lifted.
What if things were starting to go the Canucks’ way?
But then planet Earth called. Reality smacked the Canucks upside the head as the Hawks scored two quick ones in the third period.
The fans should have known it wasn’t going to be easy for Vancouver. It never is anymore, even with a three-goal lead.
That lead evaporated with four minutes left when Alex Edler fell at his own blueline and Bo Horvat defended the wrong player. But you could feel it coming. The thing is, for the first two periods of this remarkable game, the Canucks executed their trap — they call it structure — very well.
But in the third period, it collapsed like a cheap house of cards, with the hosts getting outshot 17-3.