Bruins treat fans to Game 7 for the ages in win against Maple Leafs

BOSTON --They sang Wednesday, full-throated, relief and happiness and exuberance pouring out of them with every word.
Long after the music stopped, the puck had gone back into play, the crowd at TD Garden found release, where minutes earlier they had found only nerves, only worry, only concern that this would be the end of the season.
No longer. Now they believed. Now they sang, a full extra verse of Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer" as play continued on the ice. Now they knew.

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They were celebrating, in the way that Boston Bruins defenseman Torey Krug celebrated after his third-period, game-tying goal, arms extended and face up, basking in the moment. They were celebrating in the way Bruins forward Jake DeBrusk celebrated after his third-period, game-winning goal, having lost his balance in the very moment he pushed the puck past Toronto Maple Leafs goaltender Frederik Andersen.
They were celebrating, because that's what you do when you witness a Game 7 for the ages, a game in which the highs are so very high and the lows are so very low and the emotions swing from moment to moment and, at the end, it is your team on top. Your team is moving on.
The Bruins won this game, 7-4, defeating the Maple Leafs in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference First Round, winning the series 4-3 and moving on to face the Tampa Bay Lightning at Amalie Arena on Saturday (3 p.m. ET; NBC, SN, TVAS).
It was a game that was what all Game 7s should strive to be - a mix of sheer talent and ups and downs and momentum swings and rookies becoming veterans and goaltenders as heroes and goaltenders as goats. It was messy and unpredictable, and it left Maple Leafs defenseman Jake Gardiner fighting back tears in his postgame interview.

"It was one of the most incredible games I've ever been a part of," Bruins forward Brad Marchand said.
It was everything it should have been.
And it was loud. So loud.
"It was insane," Marchand said. "You could barely hear yourself think out there the whole game. … You could barely hear the coaches and the guys on the bench talk. But we really fed off that energy and it really pushed us to be a little bit better than we needed to be."
It was hard to know what to think early in this one, a game that had four goals - two by the Maple Leafs, two by the Bruins - in the first 9:10 of the first period. It was hard to know how it would end; the goals kept coming, from Maple Leafs forward Patrick Marleau (2:05 of the first) and DeBrusk (4:47) and Marleau again (6:12) and Bruins forward Danton Heinen (9:10) and Bruins center Patrice Bergeron (19:23). That was just the first period.

Then, Maple Leafs defenseman Travis Dermott scored at 2:07 of the second period, tying the score, and pushing forward the chaos and setting up what happened next.
It felt like a dagger, a golden power-play chance for the Bruins, a shot by Krug that was whipped from the slot but resulted in a shorthanded breakaway by Maple Leafs forward Kasperi Kapanen in which he outdueled Marchand for the puck and the score that silenced the crowd at 6:05 of the second.
Then, maybe the crowd lost faith, if only momentarily. Maybe they felt the momentum swing, perhaps irretrievably, to the Maple Leafs.
The Bruins didn't feel it. They knew. They were calm between the second and third period.
"Even after they got the lead a couple times, we just knew that we have the resiliency in the room to continue to come back," Marchand said. "We've done it all year. We just tried to draw on that."

That was when it all happened.
Krug's goal, off a face-off win by Bergeron against Marleau on a 4-on-4, was a sequence that took four seconds to complete at 1:10 of the third period. DeBrusk's goal, in which he found space down the right side, around Gardiner, and through Andersen's five-hole while tumbling to the ice at 5:25, gave the Bruins a 5-4 lead.
Bruins forward David Pastrnak, who had 13 points in this series, made a nifty move around Gardiner and scored at 11:39 to make it 6-4.
It was all over then.
And the feeling?
"I don't know," Krug said, a grin creeping onto his face. "It's so exciting. It's tough to put into words."

There was little the Maple Leafs could do. They had already lost a heart-searing Game 7 in this building in 2013, one in which they held a three-goal lead with half a period left in the first round. The scars still remain. There are fresh scars now.
Bruins goaltender Tuukka Rask could appreciate it when it was all over.
"For entertainment value, that was probably one of the better Game 7s you'll see," he said. "It was offense going both ways. Goalie's nightmare."
It was the Maple Leafs' nightmare too, one that has becoming recurring at TD Garden. But for the Bruins, for the veterans and rookies, for the coaches and players, for the fans who sang and cheered and stood throughout most of the third period, for them it was exactly what they had hoped for.
It was Game 7, and it was theirs.