In a hypothetical where one person could be an entire group of guys, and in this hypothetical I were the collective and entire Tampa Bay Lightning, after that Game 7 I would order the team bus to be driven to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge—there are closer bridges to the arena in the Tampa Bay area, but none higher—and, at mid-span, drive directly off it.
A hockey player is prepared for randomness and bad luck by an entire career's worth of suffering at its whims. All they can do is pray it doesn't come for them in a big game. It came for the Lightning in a Game 7, a 2-1 Canadiens win to send Montreal to the second round and send Tampa into an offseason without even the courtesy of giving them things to kill time regretting. “We couldn’t have played it any better,” head coach Jon Cooper said.
The Lightning outshot the Habs 29-9. How rough was it back there for eternal Vezina finalist Andrei Vasilevskiy? In the night's other NHL game, Jesper Wallstedt and Scott Wedgewood gave up eight and six goals, respectively, and both had better save percentages on the night than Vasilevskiy. It wasn't even his fault, really. Two of the Canadiens' nine chances wouldn't even have counted as shots on goal if they hadn't been goals. In the first, Kaiden Guhle flung a prayer at the net that plinked and plunked its way to twine. In the third, Alex Newhook whacked a puck out of the air off of Vasilevskiy's butt and in.
Deflections happen, and so do hot goalies, like Jakub Dobes on the other end. But the sheer preponderance of chances pointed to an easy Lightning win. They held the Canadiens shotless for a massive 26:57 stretch that included the entire second period. If you were watching this game like I was, with roughly 50 percent of your attention, the evening was an exercise in not ever hearing the announcers mention the Habs' forwards, unless they'd just scored. "You're gonna win 99 percent of those games," Brandon Hagel said, and I suspect the true percentage is even higher.
Those are the breaks. The Lightning can kick themselves for losing three at home, or not finding an extra one in any of their four one-goal losses. They can wonder why Brayden Point and Nikita Kucherov seemed to disappear, or bemoan Victor Hedman's absence. There's no "should have," because if they should have then they would have, and they didn't. But they could have! Losing the most complete and dominant game they've played in a long while is a particularly painful way to go out. It'd have me questioning the existence of God, in that I'd suddenly wonder if He is real, and mad at me.
I went looking for postgame quotes from Lightning players, but there was nothing particularly pathos-laden. Not many quotes at all, really. "It’s just a lot of blank stares," Cooper said. That's understandable. Think on the last time you got kicked in the dick, and try to recall how much you wanted to talk about it.
The irony is that this was a super-successful year for the Lightning, whose window had seemingly closed and were supposed to be a team in transition yet hung around the top of the East all season long. They've had some revelations emerge on the roster, especially on defense: some young guys stepping up and some bargain-bin replacements playing well above their station. But this result will leave an unpleasant taste, because it's hard to know what to make of it. On the one hand, the damn Rangers and Canucks have won a playoff series more recently than the Lightning have. On the other hand, it has the same feeling as the last two years, when they bowed out in the first round to the eventual champs, in that it's easy to convince yourself they might have gone decently far if they had gotten over this early hump.
In the end, there are no "might have"s, either. Just an offseason of penitence, and maybe some casual reading on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics to imagine all those other universes in which a team that outshot their opponents 3:1 didn't get doubled up on the scoreboard. "Yeah it sucks, you don’t get any younger, that’s for sure,’’ Hagel said. Change of plans: Forget the team bus. If I'm the Lightning, I'm walking directly into the ocean.
