In one of those serendipitous moments, the camera just happened to be on Paul Maurice when Spencer Knight handed him the Stanley Cup.
Maurice temporarily excused himself from the interview. He hoisted it above his head. He closed his eyes. He let out some words you can’t print.
“I’ve been chasing that,” the Panthers coach said on ESPN. “A lot of unkind words about how hard she was to get.”
There is an obvious temptation to make this about the Oilers, about Connor McDavid going scoreless in Games 6 and 7, about Leon Draisaitl going without a goal for the series, about the failure to pull off a comeback from 3-0 down.
But what the Panthers pulled off over 60 pulsating minutes that played out at Amerant Bank Arena on Monday night and culminated in the franchise winning its first ever Stanley Cup, 2-1 in one of the great Game 7s you’ll ever see, that is just as impressive a feat as the one Edmonton ultimately failed to pull off.
You could not construct a tougher mental well for the Panthers to climb out of than what they faced after losing Game 6. But when the other side has the best player in the world and a comeback story, it’s easy to get pushed out of the narrative. That’s what happened to Florida in the lead-up to this game. None of it mattered once it actually started.
Ten long weeks into the postseason, all 38 guys on the ice Monday night dug deep and put on a show, most of them undoubtedly doing so through injuries. This was best-on-best, and the Panthers played with no margin for error.
And aside from letting Mattias Janmark up the ice for a breakaway goal in the first, it’s tough to find any mistakes that Florida actually made.
Florida did not have the best player in this series — that was McDavid, who won the Conn Smythe — and arguably didn’t have the best goalie either, although Sergei Bobrovsky played an otherworldly third period on Monday night.
This series, and specifically this Game 7, was won on the Panthers’ relentlessness and physicality, the way they competed for every single puck, the contributions they got from every single guy. They’re not a star-less team — they have plenty of those — but the Panthers are anything but top heavy.
That was the standout quality that got Florida past the Rangers one round ago. It was the standout quality that got them over the hump in this Cup Final. The play of the game, Dmitry Kulikov’s clearance off the line that led into Sam Reinhart’s go-ahead 2-1 goal, went third-pair D-man to superstar.
“We just have one of the most unselfish teams I’ve ever seen,” Kyle Okposo said on ESPN. “Everybody’s so happy for the other guy. Everybody wants success for everyone. There’s no ego.”
The plays that won Florida this game were made by a complete cast of characters up and down the roster. Gustav Forsling made a dive to knock the puck out of McDavid’s grasp after the playoff MVP got the puck down low with a chance to shoot with just over seven minutes to go in the game. Aaron Ekblad forced Zach Hyman to his backhand after the rubber fell from McDavid to him, allowing Bobrovsky to swallow it up.
Eetu Luostarinen, a third-line winger, bailed out the Bob by blocking Evan Bouchard’s chance with the goalie flat on his back a few minutes later. Evan Rodrigues, who notched an assist on the opening goal, killed crucial seconds off the clock time and time again late in the game by pinning the puck to the wall.
This game wasn’t so much a shortcoming by the Oilers as it was a monumental feat by the Panthers.
“They always say you can’t f–king get the words out, man,” Ekblad said on Sportsnet. “It’s incredible, it’s amazing. Sorry for swearing, but this is the best moment of my life so far.”
Saying McDavid or Draisaitl disappeared Monday would be technically correct, but it leaves something out. It uses the passive voice.
Aleksander Barkov, along with the Ekblad-Forsling pair, shut down McDavid on Monday. The Panthers did not chase matchups against Draisaitl the same way, but gave the German no space to operate for seven long games and stopped one of the league’s great goal-scorers from scoring once.
That is a standard the rest of the league — the Rangers, Devils and Islanders very much included — now must strive to reach. Nobody will get there easily.
There will be other chances for McDavid. This loss won’t define him any more than 1983 defined Wayne Gretzky or 2008 defined Sidney Crosby.
Monday was less a referendum on him than on the Panthers’ organization, which spent the last two days staring the worst collapse in the sport’s history right in the face.
“It wasn’t easy after they got to 3-3, three losses in a row,” Bobrovsky told ESPN after his 23-save performance. “But we were thinking that we have to overcome that to become a true champion.”
The Cup is nothing less than they deserve now.
