There is nothing about the Montreal Canadiens in their current iteration that causes a person to stop thinking about the team when it was the league's vibranium standard, which was nearly five decades ago. These Canadiens have always seemed somehow not it, whatever the "it" happens to be, and part of it might just be that they, like the other six Canadian franchises in the National Hockey League, have combined for no Stanley Cups in 33 years. But the cavalier term "these Canadiens" are also not "these Canadiens," as in this year's version. This year's version is in fact giving a face wash to all those notions, starting with, "You are what your anthem says you are." They have been paired in the first round with the ultra-experienced Tampa Bay Lightning, who have been the league’s signature playoff franchise for the last decade, all coached to the same stubborn standard by Jon Cooper, intractable by nature and in deed, while the Canadiens' recent history has been essentially to not be a playoff team at all. Even this one, better, faster, and defensively stouter, seemed a year too young to make the required April noise.
And that's how being dead wrong in public works. The Habs won Game 5, 3-2, in a harrowing and taut struggle played largely in their end, and they won not by being cool and elegant and Franco-flashy but by winning the faceoffs and outhitting the larger and more playoff-built Bolts.
The entire series has felt this way, in fact, as the first three games were decided in overtime, and Games 4 and 5 have been narrowly decided on the margins. Wednesday's was all of that encapsulated in a third period begun by Alexandre Texier's go-ahead goal and closed by goalie Jakub Dobes, who stopped 17 shots in the period in the face of the persistent Bolts, particularly breakout centerpiece Brandon Hagel.
On the great likelihood that none of that means anything to you, it is mostly the fact that the game, and the series, has teetered almost endlessly on the verge of going off-kilter in any direction by two teams evenly matched for significantly different reasons. For one, they established an early distaste for each other, to the point where the first four games looked like a rolling brawl waiting for the one key beer bottle to be thrown, but settled last night into a "Hey, this is serious stuff, let's stop screwing around anymore" show. Lots of series take that turn around this point, but the Canadiens are holding their own by refusing to be pushed around by a team well-versed in doing the pushing. Montreal has apparently decided at long last to join a world it used to either disdain or fail at.
Unlike, say, Edmonton-Anaheim, another extended series which has largely been failing and flailing goalies at each end, or Buffalo-Boston, which is in large part powered by a new-cool-kid narrative (Sabres), Montreal-Tampa has been the long series that deserves to be longer because the substantive difference between the two teams is that small. The Canadiens have done more to meet the game where it is because they had to, and are now as good as the Lightning at the thing the Lightning used to be best at. Of course, Tampa has been knocked out of its last three first-round series, the last two by eventual Cup winner Florida, so a case can be made that the Lightning could be in decline after winning two Cups and losing in the '22 Final, at least if you measure a team's development by that limited rubric.
But here's the kicker to all of it: Teams can and do punch themselves out too early, and this series has that feel to it—playing so hard that their tanks are half-empty for the next round, probably against Buffalo. It is the downside of being part of a great division in the current NHL playoff format; it is often hard to escape. The novelty is ultimately that Montreal is no longer the stereotypically dismissible Canadiens but something decidedly more intriguing no matter who they play next. If they survive this series and Buffalo beats the Bruins, the sheer newness of it all can carry the entire month of May.
