DALLAS -- If Carl Hagelin isn't the fastest man in hockey, he most certainly was the fastest man on this sheet of ice. No way could anyone outrace him.
He had to be thinking exactly that Friday night. He just had to be.
I mean, look at this:
The Penguins would lose this game to the Stars, 4-3, by shootout. But that goal up there, in addition to being partly responsible for pulling out a point against the NHL's hottest team, merits so much more than parenthetical mention in some casual synopsis.
It was, as Ian Cole called it, "unbelievable ... like literally beyond belief."
I'll go further: It's one of the most spectacular short-handed goals I've witnessed in a quarter-century of covering the NHL.
TAP ABOVE FOR BOXSCORE, STANDINGS, HIGHLIGHTSTo start with the routine, Hagelin, the lone forward in a three-on-four triangle formation, smartly reads that the Stars' Tyler Seguin does a faux switching of sides on the power play, meaning Seguin approaches center point only to swing back to his familiar place on the left half-wall. Hagelin doesn't bite. Jacques Martin's penalty-killing forwards were focused squarely all night on John Klingberg, the league's highest-scoring defenseman.
Because of that, Hagelin's in position to lunge forward and intercept Klingberg's transparent pass attempt back to Seguin.
"I just read the play," Hagelin would tell me later with a slight shrug.
Right. Nicely done. No prize-winner.
But what happens next is extraordinary, mostly because it's wholly possible that no one else on the planet would even conceive of this, much less try it, much less execute it: Hagelin stole that puck one-handed with the back of his blade, took care to collect it, then buried his head to go into bull-rush mode ... and evidently, right then and there, made up his mind that there was no way anyone could catch him.
Not even Klingberg, whose skating is superior even to his skill level.
That's what Hagelin was thinking, right?
"Yeah, maybe," he'd tell me with a small smile. "He's a smooth D-man, for sure. I knew he could skate. But I thought I could maybe take it for a two-on-one."
Wait, what?
"Cole told me later he could have joined me for a two-on-one."
Ha! Cole did briefly pop free back in the Pittsburgh zone, but he had about as much chance of catching up with Hagelin if he'd been starting out from his hometown of Ann Arbor!
This had to get cleared up:
OK, yeah. No two-on-one seriously entered anyone's mind.
Not Hagelin's, either. Be sure of that. Because aside from the kinetic challenges involved, it takes one glance at Hagelin's right hand being the only one holding his stick and thus the puck the entire way down the ice -- like he's using a broom to shove a manhole cover -- to realize his real intent.
"Just more speed," he'd explain. "You're using both arms to generate the speed."
Same way a runner does.
And it isn't until the one and only move he makes with the manhole cover, backhand to forehand, that his left hand even makes contact with the stick. For an equally sizzling rooftop finish over the blocker of Kari Lehtonen, who looked positively puzzled and unprepared:
My goodness. The whole thing.
Mike Sullivan seemed blown away, too. Except for the part where Hagelin's really fast, of course.
"His foot speed's his greatest strength," the coach said. "He wins footraces. That's one of the reasons he's an effective penalty-killer, his ability to chase people down, put the puck under pressure. And when there are footraces out there to be had, he usually wins them."
The most satisfying part from Hagelin's perspective, though it was obvious he appreciated the scope of the goal itself, clearly was that it served as a continuation of maybe the best he's played since coming to Pittsburgh: He's got four goals and eight assists in the past 13 games, including at least a point in 10 of those.
No surprise, it all began a month ago when he started feeling his skating return to its standard elite level.
"It's all good," he said. "I've done a good job over the past month getting to pucks and creating offense. I've got to keep doing it."
• I believe more in these Penguins today than I did yesterday. And I've been saying that a lot of late.
• I'm not one to pile praise onto Gary Bettman, to put it mildly, but the NHL's done a lot right this season. Notably, scoring is up to 5.86 goals per game, well up from the 5.44 of last season and the highest such average since 2006-07. There are many mitigating factors, but ultimately the credit -- as with the blame -- goes to the top, and that's the commissioner.
Now can Ken Hitchcock please go away?
Sure, he's getting far better results from the Stars, who were always way too loose under Lindy Ruff, just as the Sabres were under Ruff. But watching that same Hitchcock garbage in this game -- rough up the opponents' stars, pray for a lead, sit on it passively -- was a reminder that the league's always this close to swinging right back to the Paleozoic Era.
Bear in mind, in the darkest days of the evil Devils, the coaches were always principally to blame.
• Loved Riley Sheahan continuing to show better-than-expected hands, as he did with this first-period slip through Lehtonen's five-hole ...
... but loved even more that, shortly before that, he was sent to the box for a fairly routine slash. The slashing enforcement, another Bettman feather, might be the most responsible for the scoring rise. And almost no one, myself included, had ever cited that in years of complaining about a lack of goals.
• Put the league on notice: A nobody like Antoine Roussel isn't going to unhinge Evgeni Malkin.
I wondered about that in the early going, when Roussel was using various Malkin body parts for the apparent purpose of testing the durability of his stick shaft. At one point, Malkin got agitated, but Ryan Reaves skated toward Roussel aggressively, pointed a couple fingers, had a few words ... and that was that. The Stars came after Sidney Crosby a couple times, and nothing materialized there, either.
"That was certainly the tactic tonight," Sullivan said, choosing a striking term there, I thought, given that players don't determine tactics. "And there are a lot of teams that try that. We've gone through that for a couple seasons now. Teams play that way against us because they think that's their best chance to beat us. Our message to our team has always been the same: Let's play our game, not theirs."
• Rinse and repeat: The Penguins' best player in this game was Phil Kessel.
Anyone tired of hearing that yet?
Good, because, the way he's creating offense with seemingly every crossing of the blue line, it's not about to abate.
Listen to Hitchcock bringing him up completely unsolicited after this: "I think the thing that surprised you in the game is how good a player Kessel is. You think he’s just a scorer, but he’s got way more game than that. He makes it doubly difficult because you can’t focus just on Malkin because, if Kessel ends up with the puck, it’s usually a good play. I think all of us were surprised by how much of an overall game Phil has. It’s really, really strong.”
OK, Hitch can stay.
• Not to pick on Carter Rowney, but two mistakes contributing to two of Dallas' three goals, coupled with his having been banged up from blocking a shot in the previous game in Pittsburgh ... that probably ought to have Sullivan consider scratching him Sunday in St. Louis in favor of Teddy Blueger. It's not like the new kid would do worse than this.
• The power play hasn't scored in three consecutive games, only the second time all season that's occurred. And boy, does that not matter. Those guys were dominant on both chances, with as much east-west, box-dissecting passing as they'd enjoyed against anyone in a while.
• Sullivan was right on the money Friday about Daniel Sprong. Every single syllable.
• Remember what I was writing about this trip representing a serious challenge?
Well, after having to sweat through securing a point here, the Penguins next face the Blues, winners of eight of their past 11. All those guys did was spend their Friday night in Winnipeg somehow smoking the Jets, 5-2, at Bell MTS Place, where the home team had been 20-3-2 and hadn't lost in regulation since mid-December.
Don't watch this video. It's scary.