Justin Williams, acquired by Washington a couple years back for the express purpose of producing big playoff goals, had invested an unwieldy percentage of his Wednesday night dutifully chasing some diminutive rookie all about the rink.
"All night long," one of the Penguins' veterans would tell me afterward. "He was all over Jake. All kinds of stuff, too."
Right. He was whacking and hacking Jake Guentzel, jabbing him in the privates, jawing between whistles. You know, the kind of stuff the Capitals pull when they're outperformed by all of the NHL teams that outperform them.
Meaning just the one, of course.
Deeper into the evening, Andre Burakovsky's blade cut Guentzel at the right edge of the mouth. It appeared careless and not at all intentional, but the black-and-white rule calls for a double-minor for any high stick that draws blood. And yet, no official's right arm was raised.
Guentzel, the quietest player on the roster, barked up a storm before heading back to the bench for on-the-spot, needle-through-the-mouth stitchwork. He'd kept his cool for the better part of three periods. Not anymore.
"Yeah," the kid would acknowledge when I asked if he was angry. "That's no fun."
Moments later, coincidence or not, karma or not, Ian Cole found himself in glorious alignment with Williams, the real antagonist on a night when Washington went from bludgeoning the world's best player to bullying the playoffs' leading goal-scorer, and Cole didn't exactly bypass the opportunity:
Oh.
My.
The Penguins won this one, you've probably heard. They took Game 4 by a 3-2 count, and they now command this seismic second-round Stanley Cup playoff series by a 3-1 count.
But don't dare discount, amid all else that went well for the home team, the poetic beauty of that one particular beatdown.
"Hockey play, right?" Justin Schultz beamed my way through that gap-toothed grin, thumbing over toward Cole at the next stall. "That's a hockey play."
Yeah, Barry Trotz. That's a hockey play.
In spite of Williams' feeble protests upon peeling himself off the ice like Wile E. Coyote after a canyon plunge, everything about it was pure hockey. The forward gets caught with his head down, the puck's in clear possession, the play attempted is excessively cute, and pow!
"My God," Olli Maatta would observe, "what a hit."
He shook his head at glancing over at the grizzly-bearded Cole.
"But I mean, I'm not surprised. Look at him now. He's like a caveman."
No, actually, young man, there were already plenty of cavemen in this equation. From Alexander Ovechkin and Matt Niskanen for their dual savage stickwork that concussed Sidney Crosby in Game 3, to Trotz's utterly mindless remarks about Niskanen's specific role being something that somehow belonged in the sport, to Gary Bettman and all the undying dinosaurs in the NHL offices and across the hockey world who took no issue with it, much less any action about it.
Imagine their dismay, all those people, when their bid to knuckle-drag hockey deeper into broader-consciousness oblivion in America instead wound up being won by a team that conducted itself on this night with composure, camaraderie and, above all, class.
That didn't have to be the case, and it almost surely wouldn't have been for most franchises.
The fans, at least some, wanted blood. They came with signs berating Niskanen, the league, the refs. The older ones recalled the legitimately frightening mood that 1992 night at the Civic Arena when the Rangers' Adam Graves was allowed to play the game after cracking his stick over Mario Lemieux's wrist. I was there. I've still never experienced anything like it. I'll bet the extra Pittsburgh Police all over the Igloo never did, either.
If this one had opened with mayhem, or even one of the Penguins challenging Niskanen to fight off a faceoff -- think Blake Wheeler and Evgeni Malkin in Winnipeg a couple months back -- the place probably would have loved it. If there had been any kind of run at Niskanen, even one that drew a penalty, that player would have been serenaded to the box with a thundering ovation. No one would have blamed anyone on the Pittsburgh side, especially if it were someone like Chris Kunitz, Crosby's longtime friend who blasted Niskanen publicly like no one else.
It didn't happen. It didn't come close to happening.
This happened instead, a didn't-know-he-could-do-that slowhand turn of the puck on this Patric Hornqvist breakaway:
That's a hockey play.
And Guentzel being rewarded for a dogged night with a gift from an otherwise robustly disinterested Dmitry Orlov:
"Olli made a great pass, and I was just looking to get it in front," Guentzel said. "Got lucky there."
Regardless, that's a hockey play.
And Schultz ripping a one-timer with such force that Braden Holtby's blocker hung up in the air as if he were hailing a cab:
"Yeah," Schultz sheepishly confessed, "got that one pretty good."
That's a hell of a hockey play.
And it brought this goosebump-worthy reaction from Graves' slash victim, still apparently quarterbacking the power play from up in the owner's perch:
That's the kind of counterpunch he'd deliver, too, right?
And lest anyone forget the very best player in these playoffs, probably anywhere:
That's Lars Eller meeting Marc-Andre Fleury's Sgt. Hulka-sized big toe. Not once but twice.
"He made a good move, came all the way across," the Flower would recall. "I just needed to go as far as I could to go with him. And then he got that second one out of the air."
That's not one but two beautiful hockey plays.
It wasn't all picture-perfect, and the Penguins would do well to remember that, too. They threw away a two-goal lead in the second period by recklessly, repeatedly throwing away the puck. They then ran into this strange spell of icing the puck that made the third period more of a challenge than it needed to be.
And this, most unfortunately, happened, too:
That's Nick Bonino taking a Nick Foligno-style spill to draw that high-sticking minor against T.J. Oshie. And sorry, but that's just awful.
Yeah, I get the karma here, too, as Oshie's notorious for diving. I also get, as detailed above, that the Penguins were robbed of a four-minute power play a bit earlier. But I don't believe in two wrongs making a right, and I really, really hate diving. So if I'm going to fairly praise the Penguins for class, I've got to go full context and pick this out for a panning.
The best part of the whole affair?
"We wanted to go out there and try to win one for Sid," Kunitz said, "And well, that’s what we did tonight.”
Some roll their eyes at the sappy part of sports, but that's every bit as silly as exaggerating it. These players -- and the whole city, really -- were pained by what happened to Crosby. You could feel it everywhere. It wasn't just the anger at Niskanen or the indefinite loss within these playoffs. Rather, at least as I felt it, it was about the concussion history and the genuine concern for the human.
Emotions can move us all to do things we wouldn't at status quo. It moved the crowd on this night to boo Niskanen breathlessly with each touch of the puck, but it never came close to the outright belligerence of Graves' return. More important, by far, it moved the Penguins to put out their best effort and the best version of themselves in the process.
"Our team always responds the right way," Mike Sullivan, the architect of that mindset, said. "We've got character guys, people we know we can win with."
And people they can win without, if need be.
Look who was waiting when they were done:
