OTTAWA -- Canada's capital had been blessed, if you can call it that, with a boring hockey team, badly banged up, and yet, somehow, the backward-skating Senators had eked their way to the Eastern Conference final.
After two punishing series against the Blue Jackets and Capitals, the matchup couldn't have looked more forgiving, never mind favorable, for the far more skilled Penguins.
One problem with all that ...
Yeah, that guy.
It seems crazy now, but these Stanley Cup playoffs would see Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and company tear apart the prestigious likes of Sergei Bobrovsky, Braden Holtby and finally Pekka Rinne, while the only opposing goaltender who could hold his head high after any series was Ottawa's Craig Anderson.
With a wave of emotion behind him internally and across Canada, because of his wife Nicholle's months-long battle with a rare form of cancer, Anderson rose above his career norm and carried the conference final to an unexpected seventh game by making 45 saves in Game 6 at Canadian Tire Centre.
As Matt Murray observed from the other end that night, "Anderson had a big night. If not for him, it’s a different result.”
Funny, but it looked much the same with Game 7 in Pittsburgh, except that Anderson was even better. He made 39 saves, most of those of markedly greater difficulty than the previous game, and forced the crowd at PPG Paints Arena to clutch its collective breath through not one but two overtimes.
Even then, it took a Chris Kunitz knuckle-puck to bloop by the unwitting elbow-screen of Ottawa's Jean-Gabriel Pageau and drop into the net over a blinded goaltender's blocker:
Once Anderson realized it was in, he dropped to one knee even as the place erupted around him for one of the most striking scenes of this postseason.
“It’s surreal,” he'd say later. “It doesn’t feel like it’s happening, but it is. We played our hearts out, gave it everything we had. We laid it all out there. I thought it was meant to be. I thought it was our time. You need a little bit of luck on your side. It just didn’t fall for us.”
Goaltending would also prove to be the biggest story on the Penguins' side, of course. Fleury had one poor stretch of 12 minutes to open Game 3 in Ottawa, Mike Sullivan pulled him for Murray and, even though Fleury had been the team's top performer to that point in the playoffs -- any position, almost every game -- that switch would stick.
Other questions remained: Was Jake Guentzel too small and too worn down after going the full conference final without a goal? Would the Senators forcing a Game 7 give the Predators two extra days' rest heading into the Stanley Cup Final? Could the Penguins adjust right back to an opponent that plays in your face?
They wouldn't have to wait long to find out and, besides, they sounded delighted just to get past this group.
"Those guys," Trevor Daley would say of the trapping Senators, "were frustrating."
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins vs. Senators. – MATT SUNDAY / DKPS