Opinion | Leafs miss first opporunity to close out the Lightning, but they have two more cracks at it

Now that was a buzz-cut. Buzz-sawed. Buzz-killed. Buzz off.

A city that was primed to lose its mind — as if the Stanley Cup itself was in the offing on Thursday night — will just have to take a collective deep breath, hold the car-honking on Yonge Street and brace for another round of the existential willies.

A game was lost. But not all is lost. Get a grip.

The Maple Leafs have only lost three games in a row once this season. And on the shuddering morning after Tampa Bay pinned the Leafs to the mat with a 4-2 chokehold — did you really think they would go away without a flicker of Lightning? — the team, up 3-2, still has two more kicks at the can.

It’s not like the Leafs are trying to jump a pyramid of 50 cars, a la Evel Knievel. Or riding one of Elon Musk’s chronically exploding space rockets and it will all end in a shower of cascading hot metal. This is what the Leafs do, what they have done commendably since October, and they are prima facie contenders for a penetrating post-season run. But the blood chills just a little bit, doesn’t it?

The dread is understandable. The Leafs 0-10 in games where the opposition could have been eliminated in the era of Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner. They haven’t emerged on the winning side of an opening series since 2004. So nobody wants to be teetering on the precipice of a do-or-die Game 7.

But this rumble with the Lightning has been rather freaky since drop-the-puck nine nights ago. There were two games the Leafs should have lost but found a way to rally from the depths and prevail. There was just one game where Toronto was lights-out superior. The razor’s edge of two overtimes. Ilya Samsonov out-goaltending, Andrei Vasilevskiy, a pale spectre of his Hall of Fame-bound self until Game 5. A suspension. A penalty shot saved. Morgan Rielly as the most-hated poster boy. Reilly? Really?

“It’s a game of inches this time of year,” Rielly said Thursday, his blackened eye turning to a shade of plum. “Their response after the first goal, and then I thought we broke out the puck a little bit better. Other than that, I thought it was a tight game.”

We’ll get to those bang-bang goals each way in a sec. The Lightning came out in a fury but the Leafs had already cracked open Tampa’s aura of invincibility.

“I didn’t think we gave up too much stuff easy,” Marner said. “When they had their chances, they put ’em in.”

His breakaway in the third period, beautifully teed up by John Tavares, got stonewalled by Vasilevskiy.

But hang on. These aren’t gloomy hours.

Crucially, these Leafs are more comfortable in their own skin. Surely they won’t be skinned alive? Surely they won’t succumb to déjà blue?

Hold this series up to refracted light and appreciate shimmer. The Leafs aren’t an optical illusion. In playoffs of recent vintage, the players didn’t quite trust each other. Sure as hell they didn’t trust their goalie. Now they do and that’s a mighty advantageous starting point three-quarters of the way to a four-pack of wins.

The hardest one to get, as each player had emphasized, is that fourth win.

“It’s a good challenge,” Rielly said. “We didn’t expect it to be easy. This is a good team, championship-calibre team, obviously. Going on the road here, we’ve got to play with some urgency.”

Certainly the Lightning established command early, even if Toronto got on the board first. The Leafs scarcely got out of their zone the first five minutes, with Tampa’s percussive rhythm disrupted only when Jake McCabe stepped thumpingly into Brandon Hagel. Once the Leafs infiltrated the offensive zone, it was Rielly, cresting on a wave of post-season goal-scoring gallantry, who initiated the offence, cruising into the high slot, completely unmolested, after Tavares had drawn three Lightning defenders and one-handed the puck out front.

The 1-0 lead lasted all of 25 seconds before Anthony Cirelli drew Tampa level, sitting pretty on the doorstep to tuck a rebound behind Samsonov.

The Leafs wrested back the oomph during a first-period power play, attacking in a frenzy and racking up six shots that required a sequence of acrobatic pad-splits from Vasilevskiy to hold Toronto at frustrated bay.

Instead, inside five minutes of the second period, it was the Lightning who struck for the 2-1 edge, on a monstrously poor piece of goaltending. Still not 100 per cent sure where that puck beat Samsonov — the press box consensus had it under his arm — but it came off the stick of Michael Eyssimont. “He is almost one-on-one with me,” Samsonov frowned.

There was plenty of ill will and shoving when Patrick Maroon slammed Mark Giordano into the boards with villainous intent at the 40-minute buzzer, resulting in a roughing minor. Toronto sagged into a 3-1 trough on Nick Paul’s goal with eight minutes left in the third.

The Leafs almost triplicated their late- game rallies when Matthews dragged Toronto within one with 3:34 left in regulation and Samsonov pulled for an extra attacker. On this night, though, there would be no gobsmacking late about-face, thus no overtime heroics — just an empty netter and a 4-2 reckoning final for the Lightning. Really, the Leafs never quite recovered from that snapback Tampa goal in the first.

“We understand this will be a hard series,” said Samsonov, as the teams had back to Florida. “We know who is this Tampa team.”

More significantly, the Leafs know themselves by now, too.

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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