Collier: Lightning sticks this one in the ol' Easter bonnet
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And there you have it -- the big rabbit, but what did you expect for Easter?
Game 5 of this thickening Eastern Conference quarterfinal turned out to be just what Tampa Bay Lightning boss Guy Boucher ordered, a giant bunny of an 8-2 victory right in front of 18,535 stunned eyewitnesses.
Holy weekend.
Lest you missed it, Boucher's preamble had gone something like this:
"Since he's been with us, he's certainly given us confidence that any game he can pull a few rabbits out of his hat," Boucher said in reference to 40-something goaltender Dwayne Roloson. "Obviously [in Game 5], we're hoping the rabbit's going to be big."
Roloson's terrifying Day of the Lepus performance came on the heels of his stopping 50 of 53 shots in a double-overtime loss Wednesday in Tampa, and, when he stopped the first 22 he saw from the Penguins Saturday, it not only pulled Game 5 out of his hat, it pulled the Lightning back into a series that continues Monday night in Florida.
"We haven't solved anything," cautioned Lightning main bolt Martin St. Louis. "You have to play every minute, every shift. There's no figuring this game out sometimes. We got a lot of help offensively in this game. Our guys contributed."
This is how you chop the Penguins' 3-games-to-1 advantage in half, it turns out:
You get five goals in 10 minutes, three seconds after getting only four in the previous 162:38. You have Steven Stamkos get two goals in four minutes, 12 seconds after having scored only five goals in the previous 58 days.
"It's funny this time of year; I was watching the game between Chicago and Vancouver the other night and that was going similar to this," said Lightning forward Simon Gagne, who buried two rebounds to help erect a 5-0 Tampa Bay lead by the time the second period Saturday was just seven minutes old. "In this game, we got good chances, in part because the rebounds went to good spots, and the puck bounced to places where we could put it in.
"Sometimes, that's the way hockey happens, and we're just glad that's the way it went today."
By early in the third, a full-fledged Pirates game had broken out. It was 6-0, then 7-0, with the starter long gone, that being Marc-Andre Fleury, who exited down by four.
"If you've got a flower and you want it to grow," Boucher was saying about something else entirely, "if you pull the Flower, it's not going to grow faster."
Wait a minute, hadn't Dan Bylsma just pulled The Flower?
First Published April 24, 2011 12:00 am
