The Ottawa Senators haven’t been in the NHL playoffs for eight years.Jana Chytilova/Freestyle Photo/Getty Images
Somehow, it seemed sadly appropriate and unfairly cruel that those heading home late Thursday from the Canadian Tire Centre in Kanata had to drive through the pungent smell of a skunk.
After an NHL season that revived hope in the capital city that, as they like to say, “fun forgot,” the Ottawa Senators had finally reached the Stanley Cup playoffs after eight miserable years of being also-rans and non-factors.
The city was joyous, the arena filled to the rafters with rabid, cheering fans. Their heroes served up a storybook comeback – only to lose 79 seconds into overtime on a freak goal even goaltender Linus Ullmark claimed he didn’t really see.
Now team and city were down three games to none in the opening round against their archrivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs, with the Leafs on the verge of eliminating the Senators here Saturday evening.
Skunked indeed.
It had been a bizarre evening, the Senators management and fans doing all possible to restrict tickets to rabid Leafs fans who traditionally take over the building in blue and white. Thursday, however, was all red and black and white rally towels, with the Senators’ fans showing that, for once, fun had found its seat in the nation’s capital.
“It’s been a dream of mine ever since I stepped foot in Ottawa to see the white rally towels in the Canadian Tire Centre,” said captain Brady Tkachuk, who scored the dramatic goal that forced overtime.
The Senators might not have made the playoffs in eight years, but their fans took great joy in pointing out that the Leafs had not won a Stanley Cup since Centennial Year in 1967. Two fans showed up wearing Senators jerseys with “Leafs Suck!” on the back, one wearing the No. 19, the other wearing 67.
The Leafs last drank from the Cup the year McDonald’s introduced the Big Mac, the year of the first Super Bowl, the year of the first heart transplant and the year of the Six-Day War.
The Senators, on the other hand, had not won Stanley’s trophy since 1921, the year of Charlie Chaplin’s first full-length film, of Agatha Christie’s first novel, of Albert Einstein winning the Nobel Prize in physics and the year the Liberal Party launched a surprise campaign to win a minority government.
Despite series lead, Maple Leafs still need to figure out what kind of team they are
(There may or may not be any parallels to be found here.)
This marked the fifth time the modern Senators – who returned to the NHL for the 1992-93 season – met the Toronto Maple Leafs in the postseason, and it has never gone well for them. The “Battle of Ontario” has amounted, at best, to a skirmish.
That there is bad blood between the two teams is undeniable. The sell-out crowd in Ottawa screamed “Leafs Suck!” at every opportunity, as well as shouting, bizarrely, “Matthews is balding!” whenever star Toronto player Auston Matthews was on the ice.
Thursday evening on the Jumbotron even before the warmup, they showed a replay of the Ridly Greig open-net slapshot that had so infuriated the Leafs earlier in the season.
During the warmup, it has been claimed that certain Senators lobbed pucks down ice toward the Toronto net and goaltender Anthony Stolarz. The NHL took note and fined Sens’ centre Nick Cousins $2,083.33 for unsportsmanlike conduct and tacked a $25,000 fine onto the team as well.
When such allegations became public following the overtime loss, one fan posted that “the only logical solution would be to start the entire series over again.”
No such luck, we’re afraid. The Leafs will go into Saturday’s Game 4 with three wins behind them – two in overtime – in this best-of-seven opening series. The Leafs have utterly dominated the Senators when it comes to faceoffs. Thursday’s overtime goal was the direct result of a poorly played Ottawa faceoff.
“We are going to do everything in our power to make it to seven now,” said Ullmark.
Tkachuk said the team recently watched a documentary on the great comeback by the Boston Red Sox over the New York Yankees in 2004, after being down three games to none in their series. It marked the only time this had happened in World Series history and lifted an 86-year-old curse.
“So it’s been done before,” said Tkachuk. “And I believe that it can happen again.”
In hockey, such an unlikely comeback has happened only four times, one of them being the 2010 Philadelphia Flyers, who came back to defeat the favoured Boston Bruins.
Senators centre Claude Giroux was on that Flyers team.
It was Giroux who opened the scoring Thursday evening for the Senators. He had not scored a playoff goal for 13 years.
“Very frustrating,” Giroux said of the Senators failure to win a game this spring against the team they’d most love to beat.
“We’ve got to get to Game 4. The fans were incredible tonight. Playing in front of them definitely gave us a boost.
“We just have to worry about Game 4.”
On Saturday, skunks will not be welcome around the Canadian Tire Centre.
