COLUMBUS, Ohio -- He didn't mean to make the save.
Well of course he didn't mean it.
"No, no, no," Marc-Andre Fleury would tell me at his stall a little later. "Of course not."
See?
So, at its foundation, this phenomenal save, in which ... oh, just watch it again, now that you're no longer a trembling wreck and might actually appreciate it:
Fleury's right. He didn't make a Dominik Hasek-style head save. He didn't make the slightest voluntary extension of his head to deflect the puck. The shot by Brandon Dubinsky merely pokes off the upper part of the mask and sails up out of play.
"Yeah, I went down for the first shot and the rebound was going that way," Fleury recalled of the path across to Dubinsky. "I wanted to get over there as quickly as possible. I wanted to get something over there, maybe get a piece of it."
Something?
Maybe?
Let's skip ahead for a moment to the end: Fleury's Penguins beat Dubinsky's Blue Jackets, 5-4, Sunday night at Nationwide Arena when Jake Guentzel capped a hat trick at 13:10 of overtime, seven minutes after the Fleury save. That vaulted the visitors into a 3-0 throttling of this first-round Stanley Cup playoff series, putting them into position to face their next opponent, the Capitals or Maple Leafs, far fresher than they could have hoped.
Wonderful stuff, obviously. All of it.
And it's that kind of stuff that once again is making the defending champs a sheer force.
Of will.
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Playoff hockey... pic.twitter.com/4GNoLYVECu
— Zach Werenski (@ZachWerenski) April 17, 2017
