TORONTO – The beautiful and tortuous thing about this sport is that the good that takes so long to build up can unravel in a minute of crummy luck or lost focus.
The Toronto Maple Leafs had started on time, storming out of the gates with purpose and precision Thursday. They withstood hard hits, and delivered a few of their own.
They moved their feet and drew penalties. They capitalized on a power-play for the first time in four games.
Coach Sheldon Keefe’s newly formed Matthew Tkachuk solution — a checking line of midseason acquisitions centred by Ryan O’Reilly and flanked by Noel Acciari and Matthew Knies — was holding its own.
There was hardly a dent in the popcorn bag by the time the Maple Leafs had as many goals as the Florida Panthers did shots (two). The home team looked like it might run the Cats out of the barn.
OK, so Anton Lundell got one back in the first period, off a nifty behind-the-net pass from Sam Reinhart. But, still, the Leafs had dominated the first period and appeared every bit like a power awoken.
A breath. A coach’s tirade in the visitors’ room. A Zamboni.
And a clean sheet to, depending on the colour of your laundry, author a comeback or scribble a mess.
Sixty-six seconds into the second, the Panthers pounced on a William Nylander neutral-zone turnover, then a way-too-cute defensive-zone exit by Mitchell Marner and Auston Matthews.
Opportunistic bang-bang strikes by Aleksander Barkov and Gustav Forsling on back-to-back shifts flipped a 2-0 Leafs lead into a 3-2 Panthers victory, giving the road warriors a 2-0 chokehold on the series and its first five-game playoff win streak in franchise history.
Next thing you know, general manager Kyle Dubas is chucking a water bottle, and Keefe is suggesting Sam Bennett — a thorn in the Leafs’ side and now public enemy No. 1 in Toronto — be suspended.
Toronto had the night under control until it didn’t.
“Disappointing. Baffling, frankly,” Keefe said, during a brief and curt post-game press conference. Timeouts last longer and pack less tension. “We didn’t make those mistakes one time in the last series.”
What the heck happened after that first intermission?
“Just mistakes… I don’t know what you want to call it. They’re mistakes,” Matthews said.
“Couple little plays gave them momentum,” O’Reilly added. “They earned that one tonight.”
Matthews, Marner and Nylander weren’t awful by any means Thursday. That trio combined for a whopping 31 shot attempts, coming within a stiff breeze of tying the game or extending the lead early to put it out of reach.
“The originating idea is, we want to do everything we possibly can to create a Game 7. All we’ve done is, I’m pretty sure that there could be a Game 6. That’s it. Just leave it. In each game, it’s one shot,” Florida coach Paul Maurice said.
“It’s two inches, 15 times a game. Inside the post, outside the post, off the goalie’s blocker.”
Alas, the steadiness of goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky — playing far and away his best hockey at the most critical time of year — and the resilience and the aggression of the Panthers has backed the series favourites into a corner.
These Panthers have never met a check they didn’t want to finish, an opponent they didn’t want to irk, a deficit they didn’t try to make up.
“I know what we did last series, what made us successful is playing in straight lines, finishing checks, having good sticks,” Matthew Tkachuk said.
“We’re not just running around like animals right now. We’re just trying to play to our identity.”
And the Maple Leafs’ identity is something they haven’t grasped early enough or often enough in these playoffs. They’re now 4-4 in the playoffs, 1-4 at home.
Slow beginnings inspire late rallies. Strong starts recede to relaxation.
Surely, one can argue that the Maple Leafs still have talent and depth and discipline on their side. Maybe one could turn the series around in the hand, look at it positively, and argue that the Leafs haven’t played their best hockey and are still a goal or two away from leading this thing.
But only one of these two groups is playing noisy, nasty, won’t-back-down hockey — and the series is shifting south to its stomping grounds.
“For me, it’s perspective,” begins Maurice, more chatty at the winner’s podium. “That’s five games in nine nights of as an intense and emotional pressure you can put on a hockey team.
“This isn’t the Jersey-Rangers series, where the two teams are 11 miles apart. We’ve been on an airplane for a while. We didn’t think we had much in our legs tonight, so it was about character. It was just about fighting through it and battling the hard things that happen.
“Some of that’s self-inflicted. We beat it up a little bit, and we got above it a couple times and missed some routes and missed some checks. It wasn’t a perfect game for us by any means, but I didn’t expect that from my team. I didn’t expect them to be perfect tonight.
“I just wanted them to stay in the fight — and that’s what they did.”
“This one is disappointing. We were rolling early in the game and just gave it back to them.”
The heat is about to get cranked up in Sunrise.
The Maple Leafs must stare at themselves in the mirror and ask: Do we want to stay in the fight?
Because the other guys have already shouted in the affirmative.
Fox’s Fast 5
• Luke Schenn waited 5,432 days after being selected fifth overall by the Maple Leafs in the 2008 draft to register his first playoff point for the club.
When Toronto reacquired him at the deadline, we would’ve guessed he’d be the sixth or seventh defenceman. On the bubble.
Now, we couldn’t imagine this blue line playing a game in this series without him.
• Bennett is a one-man wrecking crew. This injurious mugging of Knies took the rookie out of the game. No penalty was called.
Keefe had no update on Knies’s status post-game, other than to say: “It’s not positive.”
Later, Bennett cross-checked Michael Bunting in the neck and was dinged with a minor:
Keefe said the cross-check was “eerily similar” to the one Matthews delivered on Buffalo’s Rasmus Dahlin in the 2022 Heritage Classic and earned the star a two-game suspension.
“I didn’t see the outdoor game. I know that’ll shock you, that you wouldn’t all be focused on the Leafs games. I had a pre-scout for the pesky Florida Panthers. So, I can’t comment on that,” Maurice responded. “Everybody seemed to survive that.
“The tangle up behind the net, I think we’ve been on the other side of the ledger enough.”
• Morgan Rielly saved all his big hits for May, and we’re here for it:
• Matthews tied the franchise record for the longest point streak in a single postseason (11 points in eight games). His playoff streak extends to 12 games, dating back to last season.
• Quote of the Night.
“I don’t give a (expletive).” —Ilya Samsonov, when asked about Bobrovsky’s performance
