Bolts have lost, but they've not been trampled on like this

On their way to winning two Stanley Cups, the Tampa Bay Lightning lost all of 13 games.

Not one of them like the 5-0 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Monday night. Not one of them a beatdown of significance.

Over these playoff years of greatness, the Lighting have lost nine one-goal games, four of them in overtime, almost all of them low scoring. Getting whacked is new for the champions. Being outplayed in every phase of the game has never been their calling card.

They have been the team that dictates pace, that dictates style, that is impossible to play against as Montreal found out in last year's cup final or Dallas found out nine months earlier.

They took a big punch to the gut in Game 1. Do they roll around the canvas, the way Mike Tyson did against Buster Douglas, searching for their collective mouthpieces, rather than climb to their feet? Everybody, Tyson used to say, has a game plan until they're punched in the face.

Five to nothing is the hockey equivalent of a punch to the face and when Morgan Rielly comes out swinging twice in that third-period melee, well that tells you just how seriously the Leafs are approaching this massive playoff test against the two-time champions.

Rielly's not a guy who throws punches at any time, let alone scrapping twice in the same scenario.

“This isn't the first time we've lost a game,” said Tampa coach Jon Cooper. “It's not like we're in uncharted waters.”

Well, maybe these are uncharted waters. They beat the Canadiens last year and their best player was a goaltender. They beat the Islanders the round before that, and before that, Carolina. None of those lineups have had Auston Matthews or Mitch Marner as their top two players. They beat Dallas the year before and the Stars' best player was a kid on defence and before that, they played the faceless Islanders. The only real stars they've beaten have come against the Boston big names of Patrice Bergeron, David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand.

Now they face the best goal scorer in hockey. And one of the best setup men. And the versatile William Nylander, coming off his off wing and from the third line. And the Leafs' sometimes-third line of David Kampf, Pierre Engvall and Ilya Mikheyev. And a team deeper than any Leafs team we've seen in recent decades.

Cooper being Cooper was more impressed with the score than he was with the Leafs in Game 1.

But what he wasn't impressed with was his own team. He thought they made it easy for Jack Campbell in Game 1. He thought they didn't challenge the goalie enough. He thought the normally automatic Tampa power play was off and being pushed off their game by the Leafs' aggressive penalty killing.

He wasn't as impressed with the Leafs as others might have been. Or he wasn't saying so. And he wasn't particularly enthralled by the officiating, which makes it unanimous among NHL coaches.

“The amount of power plays both ways in the first period is kind of unheard of,” said Cooper. “If you dissect the five-on-five play, it was pretty even. We didn't generate much. They didn't generate much. To me, that was the aberration. And so that's our hope, anyway. We didn't take advantage of our situation early (five-minute power play). But let's call it like it was.”

Now the question: Is this bout going the distance? Can the Lightning recover from being trampled upon in Game 1?

Cooper says they've done it before. Truth is, they haven't. This is something new for this great Lightning team. This is something they haven't faced before.