WINNER! Brent Seabrook beats goalie Tuuku Rask for the game-winning goal in the Blackhawks’ 6-5 overtime victory in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals. (Reuters)
BOSTON — Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals just seemed like it didn’t want to end. Maybe because no one else wanted it to end.
The action didn’t want to stop. The crowd didn’t want to quiet. The momentum kept moving.
The Blackhawks would strike, the Bruins would bounce back. The unpredictable became expected, the unpredictable became inevitable.
In a game that was hard to believe and will be harder to forget, the Blackhawks blew lead after lead on the road at TD Garden, but saved their season somehow by pulling out an incredible 6-5 overtime win to tie the series at two and regain home-ice advantage, heading back to Chicago for Game 5 on Saturday.
The third overtime game of the series ended on defenseman Brent Seabrook’s slap shot 9:51 into the extra session, in a game featuring 10 different goal scorers.
“It was a pretty crazy hockey game,” said Blackhawks goalie Corey Crawford, who had 28 saves. “Back and forth, there were some great plays on both sides. It was exciting hockey. It was good of us to stick with it no matter how many times we lost the lead. We stayed positive and kept playing hard.”
The two historic teams took turns bouncing an almost tangible emotion back and forth from the ice to the rafters like a turbo-charged pinball and by the third period, every play felt like it could have ended with a goal, at one point fooling the goal horn into a false signal.
The Blackhawks entered the third period leading 4-3, but after barely two minutes, the Bruins tied the game when Jaromir Jagr found Patrice Bergeron for his second goal of the game. With 8:41 left, the Blackhawks took the lead again, with Patrick Sharp scoring on a rebound, marking the team’s first power play goal in 24 attempts, but 55 seconds later, the Bruins tied the game on a light-speed slap shot from Johnny Boychuk.
“They got some momentum, obviously tying it up twice,” Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville said. “It looked like they were in a good spot.”
It looked like the Blackhawks finally had figured out the Bruins stifling defense and the black and yellow Finnish forcefield of Tuukka Rask at the onset of the game, breaking a nearly 130 minute scoreless stretch with Michal Handzus’ shorthanded goal in the first period for the first lead.
Chicago then took the first of two separate two-goal leads in the second period, following the first goals of the series from stars Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, and then after Milan Lucic cut the lead to 3-2, the Blackhawks responded less than a minute later on a goal by Marcus Kruger.
The non-stop action of the period lost any semblance of sanity when the Bruins got one of the luckiest bounces in Stanley Cup history.
Zdeno Chara had fired a shot over the net, which ricocheted off the glass, bounced on top of the net and fell right in front of the net, which Bergeron punched in to cut the lead to 4-3 with less than three minutes left in the second, while Crawford was still trying to process what had happened.
“Give the guys credit, we battled back and gave ourselves a chance to win, even though it wasn’t our best game,” Bruins coach Claude Julien said. “Sometimes you got to do that. We tried to do that tonight, but at the end, you know, it didn’t happen.”
Just about everything else seemed to.