Panthers Put the Bite on Penguins in OT

I repeat. The PenguinPoop reverse mojo is very much alive and well.

Twice during last night’s 5-4 overtime loss to Florida, truly one of the wildest and most entertaining games I’ve ever witnessed (a combined 86 shots on goal), it altered the course of the game.

Need proof? When our Pens fell behind 2-0 and didn’t look so hot doing it, I conjured up my lead-in for this post. Something to the effect that our boys had fallen back to earth with a pronounced THUD.

No sooner had I committed those words to paper than the Pens incredibly ripped off four-straight goals in a scorching comeback to snatch a 4-2 lead. Which led me to write about how my original lead-in had helped turned the game around.

Big mistake.

Again the momentum swung, this time in Florida’s favor. Culminating in a disappointing outcome. I blame it all on Mercury in retrograde.

Back to the action. It was clear from the outset our Pens weren’t going to dominate Florida the way we did Tampa Bay. Fast, skilled, gritty and just plain good, the prickly Panthers grabbed an early lead on a goal by Carter Verhaeghe while piling up a 12-9 edge in first-period shots on goal.

The home team padded its lead to a pair at 3:57 of the second period, serving as a portent for the insanity to follow. Pens goalie Casey DeSmith thwarted speedy Anthony Duclair with a perfectly timed poke check, only to have the puck deflect in off teammate Mark Friedman.

Down by two and struggling mightily to penetrate the prime scoring areas, it sure didn’t look like it would be our night. However the Panthers, playing the role of obliging hosts, inexplicably began taking penalty after penalty. Not to be outdone, the Pens flubbed the gift chances with unerring ineptitude while misfiring on not one, but two 5-on-3 power plays.

The situation appeared grim until just past the midway point of the period, when newcomer Danton Heinen gathered in a short pass from Dominik Simon and ripped the puck past Sergei Bobrovsky from inside the right faceoff dot. Beautiful shot and release. This kid’s got some skill. But I digress.

Suddenly we sprang to life. Sixty-two tics before intermission and the Pens working on yet another power play, Jeff Carter scored from the half-wall (the 400th goal of his career) to knot the score at 2-2 and set up a wild and woolly third period.

After DeSmith made a pair of huge stops on the Sams, Reinhart and Bennett, the Pens grabbed the lead on a masterful tally by Jake Guentzel at 8:01. Back in the lineup after missing the opener, the plucky sniper gathered in a rebound, skated to the wall behind the Panthers’ net, and coolly waited for an opening before using Mack Weegar as a back board to bank the puck in. Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby must’ve been beaming. Maybe Charles Barkley, too.

Swarming like bees around Mike Lange’s hive, we struck again 30 seconds later when Evan Rodrigues dove headlong to the ice and pickle-stabbed the puck in off Bobrovsky’s pads. Incredibly, we were up 4-2!

As the game clock ran down to nine minutes, eight minutes, seven…I started feeling pretty good. However, as the old adage goes, don’t count your chickens…or two points…before they hatch. In one of the zaniest sequences I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of watching hockey, literally every Penguin on the ice piled atop DeSmith during a net-front scramble. Apparently our version of a goal-line defense. After gobbling up an ill-advised hand pass out of the scrum from Brian Boyle, Ekblad somehow found an opening through the tangled mass of humanity to cut our lead to one. Minutes later the big Florida defender roofed a backhander off the crossbar to knot the score and force overtime.

The Pens nearly pulled it out just past the one-minute mark of the extra stanza. But Bobrovsky stoned a streaking Rodrigues on a breakaway and Verhaeghe, left uncovered, beat DeSmith on the ensuing rush to steal the extra point and dampen the outcome for our boys.

Despite the letdown at the end, I’ll finish on a high note. If the Florida trip is any indication, win, lose or draw black-and-gold fans are in for a fun ride this season.