Hockey's longstanding fetish for self-effacement got its best material reward in years on Wednesday night, thanks to an amazing comeback win that was at best fifth on the list of anyone’s notice, and that includes you finally doing your laundry. The Dallas Stars parlayed a well-earned 3-1 deficit through two periods of Game 1 of the Western Conference Final into a hilarious 6-3 victory over the much better regarded Edmonton Oilers, and what do they get as the new day dawns?
Crickets in a coma, that's what they get.
Scoring three goals in six minutes and five in a period is noteworthy. Doing it in the conference finals is a big deal. Doing it against Canada's last remaining hope is a very big deal. Doing it almost entirely with players from Finland is a quirky side note that probably guarantees full notice on Helsinki's Skis'n'Sticks Sports Talk, AAAAIIIAIIIAA97. But that's it.
The heroics of Tyrese Haliburton and Aaron Nesmith simply obliterated much North American air space (OK, except maybe in Alberta). Tottenham Hotspur rose from the porta-potty end of the Premier League to steal the attention of England and most of Europe in a festival of meek v. Earth victory. Even in Dallas, hockey did not lead the news because somewhere Jerry Jones was still chewing through a detail-free but verbiage-engorged summary of how The Eagle Ass Maneuver won the day in the NFL owners meeting. How do you reasonably compete with all that?
But there in the raucous but self-contained halls of the American Airlines Center, the Stars cheated both fate and the odds with a six-minute blitz of out-of-context offense that convincingly reinforced Edmonton's sense of goaltender dread. The vibe around this series was utterly upended while the rest of the world was otherwise engaged. Even the cheap current-events-glomming tactic of having the winning goal scored by a guy (Matt Duchene) who was born in Haliburton, Ontario isn't working for the general public. Their attention is elsewhere.
Which is right where the Stars want the planet's alignment. Of the eight teams left in the basketball and hockey semifinals, the Stars might be the most anonymous entry left. A case, flimsy or otherwise, can be made that Dallas' most dynamic force is actually not transplant Mikko Rantanen (yes, Finnish) but goaltender Jake Oettinger, who ought to be Finnish based on leading his surname with two vowels.
But the Stars have quietly established themselves as one of the toughest outs in sports—and here, Pacers fans are encouraged to raise their voices in opposition, as long as they do so somewhere else—and last night only helped reinforce that view. A five-spot period is rare enough in the sport, and has only happened nine times at this stage of the postseason; the fifth of those goals, by Esa Lindell, only counts for half because it was an empty-netter with three minutes and change left.
Mostly, it was the first three of them, by Miro Heiskanen, Mikael Granlund, and Duchene, that shook the Oilers and changed the series for the first of what might be several times. Edmonton's ability to finish is back in question, and the raft of concerns over starting-goalie-turned-backup-goalie-turned-starting-goalie-again Stuart Skinner are very much reactivated; it’s as though his back-to-back shutouts to close out the previous series against Vegas never happened at all, and if that is unfair it is also just How Playoff Hockey Is. There is just a great deal of uncertainty in the mix, now, to the point where even the traditional game-closing roughhouse felt like it could be a harbinger of pleasant unpleasantness to come.
Mostly, though, the Stars and Oilers will be slip-streaming behind the enormous shadow of Pacers-Knicks for the run of their series, so whatever happens will remain a secret of sorts, barring a multiple overtime extravaganza or two. But there is this: The two shittiest non-relegated teams in the world's most popular sports league won't play for real stakes again for years, and even Tyrese Haliburton isn't a good enough player to top what he did last night. The fact that nobody else is good enough to do it even once is beside the point. It all gets easier for the Stars and Oilers from here.
