Dome home no more
PITTSBURGH— The biggest surprise of all for the Pittsburgh Penguins was that it ended so soon.
Sure, they spent 43 years in Mellon Arena. Played more than 300 games the last three seasons. Made successive trips to the Stanley Cup finals. Had a seemingly clear path to a return trip to the finals again this season, with Washington and New Jersey already out of the way.
That's why their 5-2 loss to the surprising Montreal Canadiens in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals Wednesday night jolted them as much as a Hal Gill hit.
It's all over.
The season. Their chances of becoming the first team since Detroit in 1997-98 to repeat as Stanley Cup champions. Their time in Mellon Arena, which opened six years before the Penguins franchise existed and still has most of its original burnt-orange seats.
Before some fans in the last of 165 consecutive sellout crowds settled into those seats, it was effectively over.
"It's definitely disappointing," Sidney Crosby said. "Game 7, anything can happen and, unfortunately, we weren't at our best."
Including Crosby, who now joins Washington star Alex Ovechkin as being sent to the sidelines by the eighth-seeded Canadiens. The boarding penalty Crosby took only 10 seconds into the game contributed mightily to the loss.
Only 22 seconds after Crosby went to the penalty box, Brian Gionta scored the first of his two power play goals and, suddenly, it was 1-0, Montreal. A Canadiens team that once had no reason to believe it could get to this game, much less win it, began to realize it could happen.
"Who would expect it? Nobody gave us a chance and here we are," goalie Jaroslav Halak said.
Soon after, it was 2-0, 3-0, then 4-0 on goals by Dominic Moore, Mike Cammalleri, Travis Moen. Moen skated around a standing-still Sergei Gonchar to score on a short-handed breakaway 5:14 into the second period.
The Penguins, winners of two Game 7s last spring and a team that rarely gets rattled by big-game pressure, were coming apart. And it was the Canadiens, of all teams, that were causing them to unravel.
Montreal was the worst of the 16 teams to make the NHL playoffs and, arguably, the least likely to beat either NHL regular season champion Washington or Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh. Now, they've beaten both in Game 7s, after trailing Washington 3-1 and Pittsburgh 3-2.
Next up: Philadelphia or Boston in an improbable Eastern Conference finals. If Philadelphia wins Game 7 in Boston Friday, it will be the first No. 7 vs. No. 8 matchup in a conference finals."We played Washington and we were supposed to get killed and we played these guys and we were supposed to get killed," said Gill, who shadowed Crosby throughout the series. "It's nice to be part of a team that gets things done."These Penguins, winners of eight of their last nine playoffs series, never came apart like this before.Crosby couldn't score — he finished the series with one goal, as did Evgeni Malkin. Cammalleri couldn't stop scoring, getting seven goals in the series after scoring five against Washington; he outscored Pittsburgh's top three players — Crosby, Malkin and Jordan Staal — by 7-5.Halak made 37 saves and was the dominant goalie, just as he was while stopping 131 of Washington's final 134 shots in the opening round. Marc-Andre Fleury, who held Detroit to one goal as Pittsburgh won 2-1 in a dramatic finals Game 7 in Detroit last season, spent the last 1½ periods on the bench after giving up four goals on 13 shots."Very disappointing," Fleury said. "I think we could do a lot of good things and to lose like that in Game 7, it's a tough loss."The statistics illustrate Montreal's dominance, which was threatened only when the Penguins cut it to 4-2 on goals by Chris Kunitz and Staal in the second period. Montreal killed off a power play early in the third period, then put it away when Gionta scored again at the 10-minute mark.Montreal led 26-3 in blocked shots. Montreal had zero giveaways, Pittsburgh had 14. Montreal led in takeaways 6-1.Pretty obvious who wanted this the most.Pretty obvious who's going home.For the Penguins, there won't be a fourth Stanley Cup banner to transport from Mellon Arena to the nearly completed Consol Energy Center, no June parade, no Stanley Cup championship ring to go with Crosby's Olympic gold medal."I don't think we ever believed that it got away from us," Crosby said. "I think it just came down to execution and came down to one game."Following the traditional postgame handshakes, many fans in the crowd of 17,132 remained to watch a video tribute to the nation's first and only retractable roof indoor arena. Lemieux and Crosby, of course, were featured.The first game at the building originally known as the Civic Arena? Montreal 2, Pittsburgh 1 on Oct. 11, 1967."We've been talking about a lot, 'Let's make sure we play the last game at this rink,"' Cammalleri said. "That's a cool piece of history for us."
