SUNRISE, Fla. (AP) — A new season for the Florida Panthers has arrived, after the shortest possible offseason that was spent celebrating a Stanley Cup championship.
What happened on the ice on the night of June 24 was something that neither the Panthers nor the Edmonton Oilers will ever forget. Panthers 2, Oilers 1 was the final, and Florida was the team that skated off with hockey's most-prized chalice.
It was a game like none other in Panthers history, where the franchise was not only playing in the ultimate game for a title but was trying to fend off what would have been a historical collapse after winning the first three games of the title series and then losing the next three.
But what was the day of Game 7 like? The Associated Press asked five members of the organization what they recalled about the pregame hours on June 24. The answers were all different, though shared a common thread — there was a calmness and a belief that the Cup was going to be won by Florida that night.
Panthers hockey operations president and general manager Bill Zito had some is-this-it? feelings going into Games 4, 5 and 6 — the three games that Florida lost in the series.
Facing championship or collapse, the morning of June 24 came and Zito was somehow at peace.
“The remarkable sense that it was an unremarkable day,” is how he described it on Monday night, when the Panthers got their championship rings in a private ceremony.
The daytime hours of June 24 may have indeed been unremarkable. The nighttime hours, of course, were not. Zito, in his three-piece suit watching from a suite, was using all the body English he could muster in the final moments to help will the Panthers to victory. The game was tense. The afterparty was relief. But the day, the hours leading up to Game 7, were somehow like any other.
“It was a normal day and it seemed right,” Zito said. “That’s what I remember.”
June 24 wasn't the difficult day for Panthers goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky. He felt his mind wandering on June 22 and June 23, the two off days that separated Game 6 and Game 7.
He knew the last day of the season would bring either devastation or elation. There were no other options. And Bobrovsky — who had an unforgettable save in Round 1 of the playoffs, the “Bobbery” against Tampa Bay — was ready for whatever would come his way.
“Those two days were special, definitely,” Bobrovsky said. “Your mind is pulling, trying to tear you up between that you can lose everything and this is the greatest opportunity in your hands. That was kind of my thought process. I was so excited and I tried to tell myself how great that opportunity is to be in that spot, to be in Game 7 and to have the opportunity that the world is watching — really watching.”
The world saw him lift the Cup for the first time. Bobrovsky made 23 saves in Game 7.
“I stayed in the moment,” Bobrovsky said. “That was the key thing for me.”
Freedom was the word that Florida coach Paul Maurice kept saying to his team over the final days of the Stanley Cup Final. Play with freedom, he said. He wanted the team loose, to remember that the work had been done, to trust what had gotten the Panthers to the final and helped them take a 3-0 lead.
“I drove to the rink that morning, and freedom was the word in my mind,” Maurice said.
He tried to make the day as normal as possible. A morning coffee, meetings, going over the plan, trying to occupy his mind until nighttime. A couple shifts into the game, Maurice found himself realizing that it felt like a regular game.
And that was good. It felt like a game the Panthers had won plenty of times over the course of the season.
“Myself included, along with every player in that room, I felt like we were still learning going into Game 7,” Maurice said. "We were still trying to add things to who we are — and adding that freedom to our game was that was probably the missing piece. We played with that freedom.”
A week later, at the championship parade, Maurice ended his speech to the players and an estimated 300,000 revelers by bellowing one word. That word: “Freedom.”
Panthers forward Matthew Tkachuk got a pep talk from his father Keith Tkachuk and his brother Brady Tkachuk — his dad was an NHL great, his brother is an NHL star now — on the morning of Game 7.
They were appreciated, but not really needed.
“I just remember waking up, going to the rink. Everything in my head was ‘this is it, this is it, this is it,’” Matthew Tkachuk said. “I just had such a good feeling. But above all else, I was thinking ‘This is the last game of the year.' I remembered watching the first game of the year; it was Tampa versus Nashville and I was in my living room. And that day, I was just thinking ‘I can’t believe I'm in this game right now. I watched the first game and I'm in the last game. Might as well leave it all out there. No tomorrow.'”
Well, technically, there was a tomorrow. June 25 was the day that Matthew Tkachuk might have bent one of the unwritten rules of Cup possession. He took it to a bar in Fort Lauderdale (that was OK) and then walked it across the street and went into the Atlantic Ocean (that was the frowned-upon part).
“We earned that,” Tkachuk said.
Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov is the franchise's record-holder in plenty of categories. He'd been with Florida for some really bad years and for plenty of playoff disappointment as well. In short, he'd seen everything — that is, except for the ultimate game to decide the Stanley Cup.
He tried not to think about what the moment — being the person who first hoists the Cup in the on-ice celebration, the perk that captains have when their team wins a title — would mean. He tried to just think about playing. It wasn't easy.
“Game 7, if you think about it now, it was nuts,” Barkov said. “We were up 3-0 in the series, then it was tied, and there were a lot of feelings. But if you’re playing and living in the moment, you just go out there and play, and that's what we did. We just felt that freedom and confidence in each other.”
Barkov — who became the first Finnish-born captain to hoist the Cup — was simultaneously nervous and confident. And when Game 7 finally started, it felt like hockey.
“There were a lot of things that made us feel the right way,” Barkov said. "We just went out there and we trusted each other. I knew that if we did the right things, we were going to end up winning. And, in the end, we did.”
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