Kovacevic: The Penultimate

Do it for Olli Maatta.

The kid's barely out of puberty, at least to look at him, and he's been through hell and back. He's had his shoulder ripped apart once, then twice. He's faced down cancer. He's had his hip smashed by an open bench door. He's overcome so much that cancer could be so casually nestled between two other sentences.

And yet, in countless talks the past couple years, I could never get Maatta to confess to anything being amiss. Everything was always 'OK' or 'no big deal.'

Until now.

Until after these remarkable, resilient, riveting Penguins finally took down the Lightning in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference final Thursday night at Consol Energy Center, thus clinching the franchise's fifth Stanley Cup championship berth against the Sharks.

That's when it hit Maatta, the one ordeal out of all that he could discuss.



"No one likes to come out of the lineup," he was telling me at his stall, referring to Mike Sullivan scratching him for Games 2, 3 and 4 of this series. "That wasn't easy for me."

He saw my eyebrows rise.

"Yeah, I know, I've been through a lot. But this was different. This was about hockey. This was a hockey decision, and it was absolutely the right decision. I didn't deserve to play."

So he did something about it. Skated an extra hour or more after practices. Immersed himself in film provided by Jacques Martin. Sat and listened to Bill Guerin preach.

"Billy was huge for me," Maatta recalled.

And what words of wisdom did he offer?

"I just told him to relax," Guerin offered with a slight shrug. "Told him to go watch TV, put up his feet and think about something else. He's been through ... honestly, most of us can't even process what he's been through. I think he just needed to get away."

A month ago, if Maatta were approached at the Pittsburgh blue line by a nimble forward such as Tampa Bay's Vladislav Namestnikov, he'd have backpedaled 20 feet. I'm not just telling you that. I told him.

And he corrected me.

"Thirty feet, actually."

Not this time:



I could praise Maatta up, down and sideways for what he brought to the Penguins in the three games since Trevor Daley's injury forced him back into the lineup. I could even call him the team's best defenseman in that span.

Instead, I'll just point out who was entrusted to be on the ice for the final 8.9 seconds of Game 7 and who smartly buried the puck into the boards:



Yeah, do it for him.

Do it for Pascal Dupuis.

You saw him out on the ice for the presentation of the Prince of Wales Trophy ...



... but what you don't see is this proud man behind the scenes, helping equipment manager Dana Heinze tape up sticks or sharpen skates, all while wearing a three-piece suit. And you don't see when he's stuck up in the press box living and dying with every shift while being, as he told me during this one, "so much more nervous than when I ever played."

Blood clots keep him from playing. They don't keep him from his team.

Do it for Trevor Daley.

He was so much more than the greatest trade acquisition in human history, or at least since Markus Naslund.

Do it for Chris Kunitz.

His career's had two tons of dirt shoveled on it, including from this corner. But all it needed, apparently, was the same shot of circumstantial adrenaline I witnessed once before, in Sochi, when the Canadian press had made him the punching bag of those Olympics, right up until he beat Henrik Lundqvist for a gorgeous goal in the gold-medal game. And afterward in the media rope-line, he was so hot I thought he might punch right back.

Never thought I'd see that Kunitz again, on or off the ice. I was dead wrong. He was among their finest forwards in this series. And it came with fire.

“I don’t know," he answered when asked how much is still in that 36-year-old tank. "I still enjoy the competing. The emotion is still there. It’s not staged. It’s real.”

And on being back in the Final for the first time since 2009: “I’ve been here for so long. You know, we had a lot of great teams, a lot of great players. For some reason, it never worked out. Sometimes we got bad matchups. Sometimes there were self-inflicted wounds. ... It means an awful lot to be going back there.”

“It’s the coach. It’s the players. It’s the general manager. Jim has done an outstanding job," the team president said outside the locker room. "But our ownership, too, has done so much for us. Our new practice rink, the nutritionists we have, spending to the salary cap ... our ownership has given us everything we need. It’s all come together to get us to this point.”

Do it for this iconic, brilliantly revitalized American city that, against all odds, is now better known for sporting success than steelmaking and could very realistically have not one, not two, but all three big-league teams competing for championships this year.

It's a great time to be alive in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Do it for Bill Peduto.

I feel comfortable sharing that our city's mayor was nervously texting me through the game, discussing and debating lines and strategies and calls ... until he finally could take a deep breath and send this one when it was done:

"Tears in my eyes. Very special team."

Do it for Eddie Johnston.

The 80-year-old franchise patriarch, the man who drafted Lemieux and forged forever the offensive identity that's being embraced all over again, predicted in an interview with a Winnipeg radio station Thursday that the Penguins would take Game 7.

And he did so in inimitable E.J. style:

"Hell yes, we're going to win."

Radio Sync'd Highlight: Mike Lange's radio call at the end of Game 7. #Chills pic.twitter.com/IGbCk52yQ1

— Benstonium (@Benstonium) May 27, 2016