The Stanley Cup will be in the building.
And just 280 days after the Tampa Bay Lightning hoisted it inside the Edmonton bubble, they’ll have the opportunity to do it again Monday night.
Tampa has been too much for the Montreal Canadiens to handle through three games of this championship series, capitalizing on some early errors Friday at the Bell Centre and keeping the pedal to the floor during a 6-3 victory.
The cumulative score in the series is 14-5 in Tampa’s favour.
And unless the resilient Canadiens can mount a comeback of historical proportions — the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs are the only team ever to erase an 0-3 hole in the Stanley Cup Final — the Lightning will join the 2017 Pittsburgh Penguins as the only NHL teams to win back-to-back championships in the last 20 years.
Tampa hasn’t even lost consecutive playoff games at any point since 2019, and it has as many as four chances to close Montreal out starting with Game 4.
On Friday night, the Lightning disappointed the thousands of fans who gathered outside the Bell Centre and 3,500 who shelled out big money to get inside.
They had a 2-0 lead before the game was four minutes old.
Jan Rutta sailed a shot past Carey Price at 1:52 after Jon Cooper took advantage of an icing to get his top line out for an offensive zone faceoff away from Phillip Danault’s checking line. Then Victor Hedman snuck one through on a power play at 3:27, making the Canadiens pay for Eric Staal’s puck-over-the-glass penalty.
Tampa kept coming after Danault briefly gave Montreal life.
Playoff scoring leader Nikita Kucherov made it 3-1 in transition, burying Ondrej Palat’s pass with a hard backhander after Erik Cernak got the puck up ice quickly. Tyler Johnson stretched it to 4-1 by following up Mathieu Joseph’s shot in the slot.
There was briefly some optimism for the Canadiens when Nick Suzuki beat Andrei Vasilevskiy with a low shot before the second intermission, but Johnson scored again with less than five minutes to play — giving Tampa breathing room after Corey Perry put a shot over Vasilevskiy’s shoulder with Price on the bench for an extra attacker.
Blake Coleman then added an empty-netter.
