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Hawks come back from two-goal deficit by scoring five in row to force Game 7
There was no music. The red light signaling a TV timeout flashed, the members of the ice crew skated out with their shovels, the teams huddled at their benches and — for the first time all season — there was no music.
There was no need. The United Center provided its own stirring soundtrack Saturday, a standing ovation that swelled into a deafening, sustained roar for three full minutes at the 12:31 mark of the second period, the cacophony continuing even as Andrew Shaw and David Backes squared off at the faceoff dot to resume play.
‘‘It was unbelievable,’’ Shaw said. ‘‘It was probably the loudest I’ve ever heard the United Center. My ears were buzzing.’’
The crowd had come to life because the Blackhawks, as they have so many times when left for dead during the last several seasons, had done the same.
The Hawks scored five consecutive goals after allowing three in a row, with Dale Weise scoring the tiebreaker late in the second period, to earn a 6-3 victory in Game 6 of their first-round series against the St. Louis Blues.
The Hawks improved to 15-1 in Game 6s under coach Joel Quenneville and to 13-4 in elimination games, having twice extended their season in the last three nights. Game 7 is Monday in St. Louis.
It’ll be the ultimate test of character for the Blues, who have been so good and so confident all series, insisting their three consecutive first-round flops were distant memories. They’ll spend the next two days being reminded of them.
‘‘Our group is resilient; we’ve battled all year,’’ Blues winger Scottie Upshall said. ‘‘We’re in a spot where one game determines our fate.’’
An hour before the bedlam, the arena was silent. The Hawks’ 1-0 lead almost became a 2-0 edge when Andrew Desjardins chipped a pass from Weise wide of an open net. Thirteen seconds later, it was 1-1 on a goal by Upshall. Less than five minutes later, the Hawks trailed 3-1 after goals by Alex Pietrangelo and Vladimir Tarasenko.
The fans despaired. The Hawks did not.
‘‘It’s probably a lot calmer in here than most rooms,’’ winger Andrew Ladd said. ‘‘We’ve got a lot of guys that have been around awhile and played in a lot of big games and understand momentum shifts and the fact that there still was 40 minutes left to be played. There’s a lot of confidence in here in what we can do.’’
Sure enough, Quenneville juggled the lines, moving Richard Panik to the first and Shaw to the fourth, and the Hawks began attacking Blues goalie Brian Elliott from all angles. A power-play goal by Artem Anisimov cut the deficit to 3-2 at 4:14 of the second before Trevor van Riemsdyk joined the rush and knocked in a pass from Jonathan Toews to tie the score 3-3 and send the arena into delirium.
At that point, the go-ahead goal by Weise — suddenly a playoff hero after being a healthy scratch for three of the first four games of the series — four minutes later seemed like a foregone conclusion. By then, the Hawks had outshot the Blues 19-4 in the period. They’ve outscored the Blues 10-3 in the second period in this series.
The Blues settled down in the third and made a push, with goalie Corey Crawford’s stop on Jori Lehtera at 12:30 looming large. But Panik drew a hooking penalty on Jay Bouwmeester with a good rush to the net, and a power-play goal by Shaw off a pass by Patrick Kane from behind the net at 16:53 sealed the victory and assured the Hawks at least one more game.
‘‘This is a special group,’’ Weise said. ‘‘The confidence, you can feel it throughout the room. [You] get down 3-1, and a lot of teams are going to panic. Not this team.’’
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