Rick DiPietro had not won a game at Nassau Coliseum — or anywhere else — since Dec. 26, 2008, so it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that it took three periods, overtime and eight rounds of a shootout for him to get one last night.
DiPietro stopped Patrick Kaleta to secure a 3-2 win in the second game of his comeback from the knee surgeries that kept him sidelined for much of the past two years.
“I can’t tell you how good this feels,” DiPietro said after the Isles won the shootout 4-3, the decisive goal coming from Trent Hunter. “It’s satisfying, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. You can’t get complacent.”
“It’s a huge weight off his shoulders,” Isles coach Scott Gordon said.
DiPietro made 31 saves in regulation, and the Isles got goals from John Tavares (his first in nine games) and Sean Bergenheim before coughing up a 2-0 lead.
“I was [ticked] about that,” DiPietro said. “I pride myself on closing games out.”
The 28-year-old said getting the win was another significant step in his comeback. He wasn’t spectacular, but it was the best he has looked in his return from injuries, including his first game back on Jan. 8, a 4-3 loss in Dallas.
“When you’ve been away from game action for so long, the only way to get back into shape is to play games,” DiPietro said. “I don’t want to go into these games as fine-tuning. . . . I fully expect myself to be back to the way I was playing before I got injured. If I can’t, then it’s something we’ll have to talk about.”
Last night’s victory should help his confidence.
“It’s been a long time coming and a rough road,” DiPietro said. “To get the win is amazing.”
Of course, he also has to prove that his injury woes are, indeed, a thing of the past.
“When we can stop talking about this, it will be a great day, but it’s on me to stay healthy and prove to everyone that I’m back at 100 percent,” DiPietro said. “It’s up to me to try to avoid situations where I put myself in danger of getting hurt, but I’m gonna play the way I’m accustomed to playing.”
He had a hard time dealing with that a year ago.
“Looking back on it, I never felt I really knew how bad he was hurt,” Gordon said. “He did a good job of making us believers and to his credit, he wanted to play. Unfortunately, he had an injury where you couldn’t fool your body. It just wouldn’t allow him to do the things he needed. This year he didn’t try to hurry it up, he went about it the right way.”
And he has started to get results.