By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
Sidney Crosby celebrates scoring the only goal in a shootout as the Penguins beat the San Jose Sharks 2-1 in Pittsburgh last night. (AP)
With the hockey season virtually dangling on his blade at the desperate end of what will be a landmark shootout, Sidney Crosby did precisely what Sidney Crosby gets all that money and adoration to do; he not only flicked the disc into the San Jose net, he instantaneously jerked the Penguins back to postseason viability.
That would be your monster goal right there, hockey fans.
Crosby, absent for the morning skate with a sore throat and the sniffles, beat San Jose's Brian Boucher with the final Penguins shot of the game, lifting the balky waterfowl to a crucial 2-1 victory that Marc Andre Fleury nailed down seconds later when he stoned Dan Boyle.
The psychological import of Penguins-Sharks encounter last night was so significant that it stretched across most of the day, or at least back to that morning skate, where six words were spoken in a sequence so widely anticipated that you reflexively checked the precise coordinates.
It was 10:41 a.m. yesterday when Frank Buonomo, the Penguins Senior Director of Team Operations/Communications, walked out of the dressing room into a languid nest of media and said, "[Sergei] Gonchar has been cleared to play."
And with that, of course, the streets outside the old arena were paved with gold, the Dow jumped 400 points, and the metal-on-metal sledge-hammering from the construction site across the street grew so thunderous that it moved the opening date for Igloo Too up to March 1.
All right not exactly, but the imminent return of Gonchar to the Penguins' lineup for the first time since June took its rightful place as the Penguins' last best hope for a playoff reservation in this season of rampaging mediocrity.
The only problem was that the gifted defenseman had been cleared by doctors, not by himself, and his demeanor did not generate much confidence that his presence will be all that transformative.
"He's got to feel comfortable and confident," Penguins coach Michel Therrien said, identifying two variables with which Gonchar seemed disconnected. "You never want to put an athlete in a situation where you're putting pressure on him to play before he's ready."
Indications were that Gonchar will be ready for an affair Saturday in Toronto, but the Penguins still seemed to sense that so much could be lost in the meantime. The Sharks, after all, were bringing the best record in the Western Conference (37-7-7) onto an ice surface on which they hadn't lost in seven years.
"We're fighting for our lives," defenseman Hal Gill said. "Every point counts."
The Penguins, you should understand, had talked themselves into the proposition that they were playing well, even if the Detroit Red Wings had just hung a 3-0 skunking on them only Sunday. A similar result last night would have aborted all pretense that the 2008-09 Penguins are anything but what they appear, a team that allows as many goals as it scores and can no more put a decent winning streak together than it can put together a lasting Mid-East peace. A team, in other words, without a postseason in its future.
A hard-earned victory on the other hand, the only kind anybody gets against San Jose this winter, immediately would absorb a sustained momentum, the very thing Gonchar's re-emergence could magnify into a meaningful stretch run.
So when Bill Thomas got his first goal as a Penguins player by whipping the puck off a Sharks fin and into the net behind Boucher, all the emotional weight of this episode began shifting the Penguins' way at 18:26 of the second period. It was first goal of the game, and while 17,034 dearly hoped it was the last, the Sharks finally solved Fleury at 11:07 of the third.
Ryan Clowe wound the puck around the net and flipped it into traffic in the crease, where Milan Michalek slid the biscuit past the toes of Rob Scuderi to the stick of Joe Pavelski, who tied it at 1-1.
Clowe appeared to have handed the momentum right back to the Penguins four minutes later when he tripped Evgeni Malkin behind the San Jose net, but appearances are particularly deceiving with these Penguins, who've shown no particular interest in scoring with a man-advantage. Indeed, the best scoring chance in the ensuing two minutes was a breakaway by San Jose's Mike Grier, who could not solve Fleury even after sizing him up across 50 feet of ice.
To the audience's evident disgust, the Penguins flashed their power-play ineptitude in a chaotic five-minute overtime as well, managing only one shot after Malkin was held by Rob Blake.
It fell to Crosby, who had been denied for all 65 minutes and watched Boucher, Petr Sykora and Malkin in the shootout, to prove that the Penguins can still play with the best in this league.
"When you play teams like that, it's a measuring stick and it brings out the best in a lot of guys," Crosby said at his locker afterward. "But we have to find a way to play like that no matter who we're playing."
That's a perfectly marvelous idea, and the more urgent news is, it's just might get this team somewhere after all.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com.
First published on February 12, 2009 at 12:00 am
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