Sens at Land’s End

I, like many other hockey fans I’m sure, am currently at work attempting to function on less than five hours of sleep thanks to the extremely entertaining event that was the epic triple overtime game 5 last night. I love long overtime but hate the side effects — stress, followed by intense fatigue and possible crankiness if the team you’re rooting for loses despite kicking serious ass throughout the entirety of overtime.

Really, what happened there? It was the game that just wouldn’t end, in the season that refuses to stop (no matter how much I want it to), and the Penguins are the team just won’t die. Or maybe the Red Wings just won’t kill them. This inability to finish has been a bit of a trend in their playoff run. They blew a 2-0 series lead against Nashville, then took six games to eliminate the Stars after building a 3-0 series lead. It seems they’re just lacking the killer instinct this year, aside from their second round sweep of what appeared to be an oldtimers team made up mostly of players from the 1995-1996 Colorado Avalanche.

I thought the Penguins were done last night. As much as I hate them, with their hype and their youthful swagger and their disgustingly cute pre-game rituals and their horrible Gary Roberts (the player who wouldn’t retire), I have to give them credit for coming back like that. Marc-André Fleury, in particular, recovered pretty spectacularly from letting in a very weak first goal which I assumed would be the end of him. He’s a tough one to figure out, seemingly going from sieve to impenetrable force field in the span of a few seconds. It’ll be interesting to see where his career goes from here.

Can you imagine being the Red Wings today, knowing you were 30 seconds away from the Stanley Cup and you blew it? I would hate to be Henrik Zetterberg right now: that moment when he nearly got a shot at the empty net and couldn’t quite manage it — that right there is the stuff recurring nightmares are made of.

The worst thing about this is that the Penguins’ failure to fail has ensured that the Sens will still be viewed as the undisputed champions of choking in the Finals for at least another year. I was really hoping we could share that title with someone. It’s sad riding the failboat out here all alone.