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Lightning’s Five OT Win Tested Legs, Hearts and Stomachs
Aug 14, 2020
TORONTO — The puck dropped at 3 p.m. Eastern time and the playoff game between the Tampa Bay Lightning and Columbus Blue Jackets went on for more than six hours, finally coming to an end at 9:22 p.m., with Tampa Bay winning, 3-2, in the fifth overtime period. The game went on so long that the Boston Bruins’ opening-round playoff game against the Carolina Hurricanes, which had been scheduled to begin at 8 p.m., was pushed to Wednesday morning. At one point, in the fourth overtime, the scoreboard high above Scotiabank Arena put up a reminder to its spectator-less stands, “It’s time for the 7th period stretch.” Later, at the end of that period, the Lionel Richie song “All Night Long” blared over the speakers. This was a hockey marathon of the strangest proportions in perhaps the strangest year in N.H.L. history, with a pandemic forcing the league to play without fans in the building in the two playoff hub cities of Edmonton and Toronto .
Too bad. Historic games don’t happen very often. They are made for fans in the stands, who can look back some day and tell family they were there. But instead of the building vibrating with crowd noise, it was eerily quiet, except for the thwack of sticks and the speakers piping in a low hum of crowd noise to add some suspense and fake realism. Players jostled frequently as the tension in the game built. Between periods, as the action drifted into a fifth overtime period, players drank water and Gatorade, consumed gel packets, and ate power bars and bananas to preserve energy and stave off cramping. The players hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and after the fourth overtime period, Lightning Coach Jon Cooper looked over at his salmon salad in the coaches’ room and wanted to devour it. “But I thought that was going to, I don’t know, break up the karma,” he said. “So I stayed hungry.” Finally, Tampa Bay’s Brayden Point ended the suspense with the game-winning goal. It was his second goal of the night. The Lightning now have a 1-0 lead in the best-of-seven opening-round Eastern Conference series and took a big step toward avenging last year’s opening-round ouster. The Blue Jackets swept the top-seeded Lightning out of the 2019 N.H.L. playoffs, before losing to the Bruins in the second round.
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