Maple Leafs 2 – Panthers 1 (Game 4) | The Leafs are still breathing

We’ll have to put away the easy jokes about first-round wins and 1967 for another time.

Because the Toronto Maple Leafs, against all odds, and also faced with a summer of bad jokes on the horizon, have chosen to stand up. Finally.

On this seemingly mournful Wednesday night at Sunrise, the players in blue and white played an almost flawless game, to finally win a game in this series against the Florida Panthers, the fourth, by a score of 2-1 .

Are the Leafs now in the driver’s seat, suddenly? Of course not.

It’s the Panthers who have a 3-1 lead in this series, and until proven otherwise, 0-3 deficits in a series aren’t that easy to make up for. In fact, you can count on the fingers of one hand the clubs that have achieved such a feat in the history of the National Hockey League.

But for now, at least, the Leafs are still breathing.

The bottom line is that a youngster, goaltender Joseph Woll, 11 games of NHL season experience, arrived in that net—the first rookie goaltender to play a playoff game since Félix Potvin. in the Leafs’ net — and made the right saves at the right times. He got 25 shots, which isn’t that huge, but he was solid.

But above all, we remember that the Leafs spent the game dictating the tempo. Florida’s opponents struggled to touch the puck, and when they had the object in their possession, there were one or two guys in white and blue around. All the time.

The Leafs are rarely seen as an aggressive forechecker, but that was the case on Wednesday night. As Simone de Beauvoir once wrote: that’s how you win in hockey, and even more in detail.

Now the challenge for the Leafs is to repeat that kind of performance another time, then another, and finally another. Why not ? Everything has been said about the big guns of the Leafs, too quiet since the start of this series. And who, exactly, sounded the charge this time? Nylander with the first goal, and Marner with the second. There are no coincidences in hockey.

The potential miracle of the Leafs is undoubtedly due to this, moreover: the star players of this club, so quiet since the start of this series, cannot be silenced for four games in a row. And maybe not five, or six or seven, if that is.

The Panthers, they seemed to have run out of patience for the first time in this series, by chaining shots that were both dubious and unfair. Is the damage “inside” the head, to quote Stéphane Ouellet?

We’ll see Friday night. In the meantime, the Leafs have what they wanted: another chance. It’s already that.

Up: Mitch Marner

A pass, and also the winning goal.

Down: Eetu Luostarinen

It was his unnecessary penalty early in the game that led to the Leafs’ first goal.