Joseph Woll of the Toronto Maple Leafs gives up a goal to Sam Reinhart of the Florida Panthers May 9, in Sunrise, Florida.Carmen Mandato/Getty Images
If you had to pick a moment during the past twenty years when it was best to be a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, Friday night around 8 p.m. ET would be up there.
Leading 2-0 in their series against the toughest out in hockey, and 2-0 in the game, the Leafs were the version of themselves that has only existed in Toronto’s imagination recently. Not just good, but lucky. Fated to win.
You may have been congratulating yourself on all that hard work you’ve done over the years. All of the beers crushed, many of them cried into. This was as much yours as any of the players. More, maybe. You’ve been with the team longer, and get paid a lot less.
You would have been forgiven for looking ahead in that moment. First brush Florida aside, then maybe Washington and then – you don’t want to jinx it by saying it out loud – the Medmonton Broilers.
That was your mistake. You’re paying for it now. A series the Leafs looked close to tucking in their pocket is a toss-up again after Florida’s flip-flop 5-4 victory here.
Who’s to blame for this worrying turn? Brad Marchand, obviously. Who else? He scored the overtime winner.
“They have that killer instinct thing now,” Marchand said of the Leafs later. That may the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about them.
This was the sort of up, down and occasionally sideways game that featured three own goals and another pushed across the line. As this series gets weirder, it also gets better. Game 4 goes Sunday night in Sunrise.
In the prelims, the Florida players emphasized that they were excited to be down by a couple of games. It gave them a chance to test themselves. Florida coach Paul Maurice talked about the “feedback” a team gets when it’s playing at home and something happens.
That feedback arrived 23 seconds into the game. After zipping the puck around like they were working a drill amidst five red pylons, the Leafs planted one in the Florida net. The crowd was still cheering to mark the start of the game. It was like someone shut off a stereo.
Six minutes later, John Tavares was given the freedom of the Florida goal. He skated all the way around it. Panthers’ goalie Sergei Bobrovsky spun in place watching him do it, leaving the weak side open. 2-0 Toronto. That was the moment of unrealistic expectation.
It was 3-1 Leafs in the second when the board began to tilt. It started with a scrum in the Leafs net. A puck snuck through Joseph Woll and began to dribble across the goal line.
Brandon Carlo, wielding a broken stick he operated like a pool cue, managed to stop it from going in. But in so doing, Carlo fell into the crease and on top of his goalie. Then, in their struggles, he and Woll somehow conspired to push the puck over the line. A few Florida players on the other side of scrum may have helped.
If either Leaf had managed to keep one or the other of their bodies over the puck the whole way, things might be very different right now. But one overhead angle caught the puck slipping away from both of them.
It took forever to find that definitive replay. They’d been cycling through them on the scoreboard at Amerant Arena. With a televised mystery angles shoehorned into the hockey game, a crowd that had given up was reinvested. When they finally got their score, the building fairly shook with triumph.
Florida tied it a few minutes later. By 8:45 p.m., the first ‘U-S-A’ chants of this year’s Panthers run had kicked off. A couple of minutes later, Tomas Nosek caught Woll in two minds, neither of which was concentrated on the puck. The first bad goal allowed by a Leafs’ netminder in the series put Florida ahead.
Toronto tied it on another preposterous score – a shot that bounced off Bobrovsky, into the shin of Florida defender Seth Jones, and back into the net.
Toronto tried to Toronto it in the late going – Max Pacioretty took a pointless tripping penalty with two minutes of regulation remaining. But as they had all evening, Florida treated the Toronto net as if it were two or three inches narrower than the one they’re used to practicing on. The Panthers took 36 official shots, and about a hundred more that just missed.
So on to overtime.
It seesawed back and forth until Marchand circled the net from 30 feet away and launched a shot that hit Morgan Rielly and popped up and over a crouched Woll. Amazingly, it was the second puck Rielly inadvertently put into his own net on the night.
“Yeah, they had a good second (period),” Leafs coach Craig Berube said, entering his monosyllable mode for the first time in these playoffs. “OT’s OT.”
The loss was a bitter disappointment to the Leafs. You could see that from their expressions. They had a chance to get Florida buried up to its neck, and couldn’t manage to keep them from fighting their way out of the hole. If this series goes pear shaped for the Leafs, Friday night’s second period is where the oscillation began.
But the excuses that Florida was recently using work just as well for the Leafs. Each victory in this series has been an inch away from being a loss, and vice versa.
Toronto has already proved that they’re not going to collapse this time around. They may yet lose, but it’s not the same thing.
For Leafs fans, it’s a return to the median. No more dancing in the streets before the games begin. No more imagining how great it’s going to be when your team is still playing in June.
Until further notice, it’s back to the constant low-grade anxiety of the toughest job in fandom – believing that this time it’s different, and that the Leafs are for real.