By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/?m=1
OTTAWA -- All too often, overtime goals are not the result of clinical, pristine offense, but of hockey's sweet natural chaos.
It's why when the next goal is going to win it, the game and perhaps the playoff series, puck possession becomes paramount. When the disc gets itself freed in overtime, as it did here Saturday from the care of Penguins Chris Kunitz and Michael Rupp, an opposing goal almost seems to announce itself.
The crowd tenses. The crowd gasps.
Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press
Penguins forward Matt Cooke a second period goal in Saturday's win at ScotiaBank Place in Ottawa.
But those giveaways were excused by fate early in this overtime, and minutes later, with the score tied, 3-3, Jordan Staal went behind the Ottawa net to force the turnover that sickened Ontario.
Staal streaked into Senators defenseman Erik Karlsson, separated him from the puck, swept it to Pascal Dupuis, and in a blink -- and a gasp -- Game 6 was history, as was this Eastern Conference quarterfinal.
"Turnovers are always huge, but obviously in overtime, they're even bigger," Staal said in the minutes after Pittsburgh advanced to the semis. "It was more of a reaction on my part than anything. I didn't really think about it. I had some time once I got it and I knew somebody was going to be open, somebody was going to be coming. Duper got open and he got off a great shot."
It was the Penguins' 43rd shot, two nights after they'd sprayed a staggering 59 of them at Ottawa goalie Pascal Leclaire, who confounded them again for most of Saturday night's 69-plus minutes.
In fact, for most of the 69 minutes, that phrase that kept emanating from the Penguins' dressing room -- get to our game -- had begun to appear as though it will soon have actual relevance. After a sometimes inconsistent winter and then a nearly implosive 72 hours of Senatorial playoff dominance, maybe the Penguins were finally getting to their game.
Golf.
Dan Bylsma's defending Stanley Cup champions might have been free to arrange tee times by late Tuesday had they somehow opted to join the Ottawa Senators on the postseason ledge rather than push them off in either of two consecutive opportunities.
Ottawa's workmanlike 3-0 lead Saturday night severely threatened to even this series at three games apiece, a pickle the Penguins arranged for themselves in good part by failing to score for more than 89 minutes after Sidney Crosby handed them a 3-2 lead with the goal that should have ended the series in that third period Thursday night in Pittsburgh.
It wasn't until Matt Cooke jammed a loose biscuit by Leclaire at 10:56 of the middle period Saturday night that the Penguins remembered that the net is still a viable destination for a hockey puck. It had been precisely 89 minutes and 1 second, including two-plus periods of overtime, that Leclaire was merely flawless.
In one sense, though, the Penguins could be said to be improving as this series neared its climax. In Game 5, Pittsburgh dug a two-goal hole for itself in a brisk 11:33. In Game 6, it took Ottawa all of 21:51 to go ahead 2-0 and nearly another eight minutes to make it 3-0.
A fourth Ottawa goal was disallowed when Mike Fisher's shot leaked through the consistently unspectacular Marc-Andre Fleury, but after a delay long enough to have included the video jockeys at the home office in Toronto successfully sending out for pizza, it was ruled that the Senators' Matt Cullen had dislodged the post to Fleury's left just before the puck crossed the goal line.
That would have prevented the overtime, of course, but there's something about playoff hockey that tends to make overtime contagious. Three times in last spring's epic series against the Washington Capitals did the Penguins work overtime, a pathogen unleashed by an overtime affair against Philadelphia in the quarterfinals.
The Penguins earned Saturday night's extra period with a third period awash in the kind of furious offensive hockey that might have served them well earlier in the evening. From the start of the third until the 17:21 mark, Pittsburgh outshot the Senators, 18-2. Bill Guerin drew them within one at 7:03, and it went to the familiar 3-3 five minutes later when Mark Eaton's wrister from the left circle clattered off Alexei Ponikarovsky's stick, Leclaire's person and onto a silver platter for Cooke, who got his second goal of the night.
"We started to get a lot more traffic in front of the net," said Ponikarovsky, whose pretty re-direct help complete an uproarious comeback. "We did a much better job in that third period. We drove the net, shot the puck."
Talk about getting to your game. And yeah, it's still hockey.
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