Happy Three-Year Anniversary Of Bruins' Game 7 Comeback Vs. Toronto Maple Leafs
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- I still can't believe it. It's been three full years. And I still can't believe it.
It was May 13, 2013. It was Game 7 at the Garden. And the Bruins lost the game.
With more than 14 minutes remaining on the clock, fans flocked in droves to the exits, disappointed with a premature ending to a promising lockout-shortened season.
Claude Julien was for sure going to be fired. Peter Chiarelli, too. Perhaps the core was going to get broken to bits. Zdeno Chara, Tuukka Rask, David Krejci, Milan Lucic -- anyone, really -- owned uncertain fates.
The season was over.
It was over because Phil Kessel scored early in the third period to give the Maple Leafs a 3-1 lead. Three minutes later, Nazem Kadri buried a rebound of a Kessel shot, and the score was 4-1 with 14:31 to play.
"To be honest," rookie defenseman Dougie Hamilton said after the game, "I kind of thought we were done."
It was over.
Nathan Horton scored a goal four minutes later, but we all knew it wouldn't matter. One for the stat pages.
And with 1:22 left on the clock, when Lucic was in position to score on a Chara rebound, we'd be lying if we said the Bruins didn't grab our attention. But we understood that the odds of scoring that game-tying goal with such little time remaining remained awfully slim. It was possible, sure, but there was no need to get excited.
As it turned out, the Bruins had much more time than they needed.
Immediately after the Lucic goal, Bergeron won a center-ice faceoff draw. Horton passed back to Chara, who passed along to Krejci, who got his legs churning before sending the puck deep into Toronto's end. There, six black jerseys swarmed the zone. Five skaters in white jerseys stood by helplessly, seemingly unable to move. The puck cycled high up the half wall to Jaromir Jagr, who backhanded it back below the goal line. Horton and Lucic got tangled with the puck and the net before the puck made it back out to Jagr, this time manning the right point. Jagr set up Bergeron for a one-time opportunity from the blue line, but Bergeron deferred, instead sending a pass to Krejci at the left faceoff circle.
Krejci fed it back to Bergeron, still in position at the center of the blue line. With Nikolai Kulemin standing in the way, Bergeron didn't like his shooting angle. A player more susceptible to the pressure of the moment might have panicked and forced a shot into the opponent's shin pad, perhaps opening the door for Kulemin to deliver an empty-net dagger. But Bergeron is Bergeron, and he is unflappable. So he delayed and wiggled forward a few feet, looking for the perfect line to the net. He got it.
With Chara's massive frame fronting goaltender James Reimer, Bergeron sent a sneaky wrister toward net.
Goal.
Mayhem.
I haven't lived the longest life, but I can tell you that I've never heard a building so loud. I'd venture to guess that the 14,000 or so folks who stuck it out to the end would say the same. It was complete and utter pandemonium. It was euphoric. And that's all at a time when everyone knew that work needed to be done.
Of course, Bergeron's goal only tied the game. The opportunity for the gut punch of allowing the Maple Leafs to score remained. But it truly seemed that nobody in that building believed such a scenario was possible -- and that included the Maple Leafs themselves.
After a delay of several minutes due to fans losing their minds in celebration, the Bruins actually almost won the thing in regulation, but Rich Peverley couldn't handle a bouncing rebound on the goal mouth.
No matter, really. The fans all stayed in their seats and belted out "Don't Stop Believing" and "Livin' On A Prayer" during the intermission. Normally, those are, objectively, the worst songs of all time, appropriate for enjoyment only when the cover band is finishing its set at 1:45 a.m., or when one has consumed one or five too many adult beverages and needs some electric guitar in his ear. But in this instance, it ruled -- absolutely.
Overtime eventually began, with the crowd just as raucous as it was when the teams left the ice at the end of regulation. The Maple Leafs did muster a couple of shots on net during the OT, but Rask was operating on another planet that spring. Those shots had no chance.
And, as everyone knows by now, Bergeron entered the zone with speed, weaved through three Maple Leafs, and carried behind the net before taking the puck through the corner and it cycling it back to Tyler Seguin at the goal line. Seguin did his best Jagr impression by sticking his backside into Jake Gardiner to create some space before firing a spin-around wrister on net. Reimer let up one of his patented humongous rebounds, which Johnny Boychuk pounced on at the half wall and fired on net. Brad Marchand found that rebound, skated to the corner, and then set up Bereron for a one-time slapper at the top of the right circle. Reimer made that save, but gave up another rebound.
It was here that Seguin showed some unheralded heart, as he wrestled like hell with Gardiner and Mikhail Grabovski for that loose puck. Seguin won the battle, forcing Reimer to intervene with a desperate poke check to free the puck. The problem for Reimer was that Gardiner beat him to it, and the defenseman sent the puck directly to the bottom of the right faceoff circle and to the stick of Bergeron, who does not miss from there.
Game over. Series over. History made.
It was, without question, one of the greatest games in Boston sports history, not only for the sheer dramatics, but for the forgotten details that made this night special. Veteran defenseman Andrew Ference was out due to injury. Dennis Seidenberg skated just 37 seconds before having to leave due to injury. The absences forced the 19-year-old Hamilton to play 21 minutes in just his third-ever playoff game. It forced Chara to tackle a mammoth 35:46 of ice time, and it required the inexperienced Matt Bartkowski to log 25 minutes, too.
Aside from the game dynamics, there was the city of Boston to consider. Just a month earlier, the city had been rocked to its core by a terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. Though the horror of that day remained difficult to shake, it was through that experience that the sideshow of sports was able to play a crucial role in the recovery process. And in that effort, the Bruins accepted responsibility, serving as the city's unofficial first meeting place both after the bombing itself ...
... as well as the day after a city-wide lockdown resulted in the capture of one of the terrorists. And throughout the playoffs, before every game, the Bruins welcomed heroes from the city to serve as honorary banner captains.
Yes, it was still just a hockey team, one made up of players from Canada and the Czech Republic and Finland and all over. But the men on that team knew what was happening in the city they called home, they knew the role they could play in the healing process, and they embraced it 100 percent.
The result was a truly special environment inside of that building in the spring of 2013. Nobody on the team stated directly that they felt a particular pressure to perform for the city, but it was evident that the Bruins players on the ice on May 13, 2013, did not want to let anybody down.
And aside from all of that, there were the implications. Numerous jobs were on the line, and the players knew it.
"When you're looking at the clock wind down with half a period left at 4-1," Lucic said in the victorious locker room, "you start thinking to yourself, 'Is this the end of this group here?' Because it probably would have been if we didn't win this game."
Yet somehow, despite all of that, and despite trailing by three goals with 10 minutes to play in a Game 7, the Bruins remained unreasonably confident.
"The mind-set was different," Lucic said of the final minutes. "In the season when you're out on a 6-on-5, sometimes you start thinking, 'I don't want to be on for that empty-net goal,' where this time it was, 'We're going to score. We're going to retrieve the puck. We're going to score.' Them getting an empty-net goal I don't think was in any of our minds; at least it wasn't on my mind."
"I know two minutes is not much for two goals, but we really felt like we had enough time to do it," Bergeron said. "We moved the puck real well. We opened up a lot of plays by staying poised with the puck and knowing where guys were going to be around us. It was a great play by all of us there. Everyone was at their spot where they needed to be."
Somehow, this confidence was visually evident. It could be observed not only from the players on the ice but from the fans in the stands. I wrote in my own live blog at the time, "Good back-and-forth action, but it's not as tense in here as you'd think. Confidence is everywhere."
The overconfidence paid off, and by the end of the night, the players and coaches involved were just as drained as the folks who rode every up and down while watching in person or on TV.
"That was unbelievable. That's one thing you're going to remember probably for the rest of your life," Boychuk said. "Never say die."
"I think I'm in shock a little bit," Hamilton said.
"Drained, obviously is probably the key word," said Julien.
And, then, there was the other side.
"This one is probably the toughest losses I've ever had in pro hockey," Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf said.
"Just an empty feeling, really," said Reimer. "A case like tonight there is no next time, it's just next year. So you know, it's really just an empty feeling."
The win served as a springboard for the Bruins, who barreled through the rest of the Eastern Conference playoffs with a renewed sense of self-assurance. They beat the Rangers in five games and swept the Penguins, and if it weren't for a dynastic Blackhawks team emerging from the West, it's fair to believe the 2013 Bruins would have lifted a Cup for just the second time since Richard Nixon was in office.
Alas, the Blackhawks were a historically great team, one capable of pulling off a stunning victory on that same Boston ice just six weeks later. That time around, it was the Bruins who got caught standing around. Seidenberg got sucked into the corner, Lucic was late to react, and Bryan Bickell tied Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final with a little over a minute left. Seconds later, a Johnny Oduya point shot was deflected past Rask and clanged off the post. Boychuk lost track of Dave Bolland, allowing him to score the Cup-winning goal.
And just like that, the Bruins were getting a taste for the same emotional devastation which they delivered to the Leafs a month earlier. Since then, the Bruins haven't exactly been flying high, and it appears the glory days of being an NHL powerhouse may be over for the time being.
Over time, it's that second game that will be remembered most in history. Championships, after all, is the easiest way to keep track of our sports, particularly as the years wear on.
But similar to the way Carlton Fisk's Game 6 home run in a losing World Series stood as the symbol of Red Sox hope for decades, the miraculous comeback that the Bruins forged in Game 7 against Toronto should forever go down as one of the greatest games in this city's rich sports history. Anybody who experienced that game in any way -- whether they were on the team, in the stands, watching on TV, or even if they were too disturbed to watch and had to follow an online box score -- will never forget what took place that night.
You can email Michael Hurley or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley.
