The Rangers were 20 minutes away from advancing to the Eastern Conference Finals on Monday night at Madison Square Garden, and the Hurricanes knew it.
“When you get into the third period, you realize it might be the last period of the season,” Carolina’s Evgeny Kuznetsov said.
Instead, the Hurricanes, who were scoreless in the first two periods, scored four points in the third to defeat the Rangers 4-1 and advance to Game 6 in Carolina.
“Now it’s a dogfight,” said Kuznetsov, who scored the winning goal at 6:39 of the third inning.
Jordan Staal tied it at 1-1 at 3:33 of the third inning, but the Rangers couldn’t recover.
Now, the Canes have as much life as they had in this series, but they know they’re only one loss away from elimination.
“They bought us another day,” head coach Rod Brind’Amour said.
Heading into the game, the Hurricanes acknowledged their precarious position and sought to overcome a 3-0 deficit in the series before winning Game 4 in Carolina to take the series back to the Garden.
And now, with the pressure creeping on the Rangers, they once again head to Raleigh, North Carolina for Game 6.
“We were losing 3-0. [in the series] It was so fast that I didn’t even know what was going on,” Carolina’s Martin Necas said. “Then we started our game. We have [playoff] The experience in this room is huge. ”
And they have another one now.
“We believe in this locker room,” Necas said. “We are not satisfied. We are going home.”
Staal’s goal, a nifty backhand that beat Shesterkin, changed the tone of the game, and perhaps the series.
“We believed in our game and we live to play again someday,” Staal said. “We knew we had to play our best moments and we did that. We’re fighting for our lives.”
That won’t change in Game 6.
“It won’t be easy,” Dmitry Orlov said. “Now it’s more difficult.”
“When you’re fighting for your life, there’s a lot of pressure on both sides,” Stahl said. “We were clawing at it.”
The intensity increased heading into Game 6, and the possibility of the Hurricanes forcing a Game 7 and pulling off a historic comeback became more realistic.
“We had a pretty high level of desperation. We had no choice but to do it,” Brind’Amour said of Game 5.
But the team’s confidence “has always been there,” the coach said.
