Desjardins: Blackhawks must play full 60 in Game 4

Chicago Blackhawks forward Andrew Desjardins will be blogging for NHL.com periodically throughout the Stanley Cup Final against the Tampa Bay Lightning. In this edition, he explains what it's like to take the ice after scoring a goal only to allow one quickly afterward, as the Blackhawks did in the third period of Game 3.

CHICAGO -- It started off great.

I thought after they (the Lightning) came out hard at first, we had a really good first period. We did a good job getting pucks to the net with 19 shots on goal, and that was a positive to come out of it.

There were a lot of good things in that game for us. We did a good job on special teams, had a huge 5-on-3 penalty kill, got a big power-play goal. But it's a 60-minute game, and you've got to play for 60 minutes. You can't have those lapses.

One of them came after [Brandon] Saad gave us the lead 2-1 in the third and the building was going nuts.

I was sent out for the next shift, and we gave up the lead 13 seconds later [on Ondrej Palat's goal].

Obviously you don't want that to happen. Those are crucial times.

You can't blame anyone, but those things happen sometimes. We've got to find a way to stop those kinds of things from happening.

You know when you're coming out for a shift like that it's an important shift, and you've got to do everything you can to keep that momentum moving forward. It's unfortunate when it doesn't happen that way and it kind of goes the opposite way on you.

But I thought the feeling on the ice and on the bench was not to dwell on it. You're still in the game. Everybody was pretty calm. We were one goal away from being up again, and the chatter on the bench was about who was going to be the hero.

I think this group has shown that calmness and that resiliency to take that stuff and not allow it to really hurt us. In this case, the game didn't turn out the way we wanted, but it's hard to say that was a direct result of that goal.

When they scored the winning goal, there was admittedly a bit of shock on the bench. There wasn't much time left. But again, we gathered ourselves and went out there in full-out attack mode, pinching, getting ready for the goalie to come out. We had been in this situation before and we knew what to do to try and get that goal back; we just came up a bit short.

After we lost Game 2, I was feeling really positive about our game. But this time I don't think we had a complete effort. We had some really good parts of the game, but it's that 60-minute game that we really have to get to. Every game has momentum swings, but there are certain things we can do to be better over 60 minutes, and that's what we'll need to correct before Game 4.