Stanley Cup Final blog: Colton Parayko

St. Louis Blues defenseman Colton Parayko will be keeping his own blog throughout the 2019 Stanley Cup Final against the Boston Bruins. He will check in regularly with behind-the-scenes access.
Parayko was plus-1 with two shots on goal and two hits in a Blues-high 26:11 of ice time in a 4-2 loss to the Bruins in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final.
In his second entry, Parayko writes about playing in his first Stanley Cup Final game, the atmosphere at TD Garden, and what the Blues need to do to rebound from a loss when they led 2-0 one minute into the second period.

It was an exciting game. The fans were good from warmups on, and that just made for an exciting environment. I thought that we did a good job early on, with our forecheck, and obviously at the start of the second with the forecheck too. I think we just deviated from our game a little bit. It was a good experience for us to get the first one under our belt, and I'm looking forward to Game 2.
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I think both teams are really good teams. There are opportunities going both ways, and we need to make sure we play a full 60 minutes as a team. I think that is going to be big going down the stretch here, to just continue to play our game for the full 60, and if we do that, we give ourselves a good chance. I think that is the biggest thing.
It's tough to pinpoint one thing (that changed the game), but we just kind of got away from our game a little bit. It's easy to say it's disappointing, but we continued to battle and gave ourselves a good chance going into the third. But we need to make sure we play a little tighter and come out next game with a good attitude.
The whole day was exciting. We did our pregame routine. We came here for pregame skate, had our pregame meal at the hotel, I had my nap, and before I knew it, we were here at the rink and getting ready to suit up. It was just kind of the same as yesterday, the pregame. Game days go by quick for myself and a lot of the guys, so it's nice that it's finally here. And now that the series has started, tomorrow is kind of a day we get the opportunity to regroup and look at videos as a team, and the next day is game day again, and it's a good chance to help flip the page from tonight.
The atmosphere was great. They (Bruins fans) did a good job. I wasn't really sure what to expect, obviously. We saw they had that scrimmage (on May 23), and the fans were good. We knew it was going to be loud and was going to be electric in there. That's fun for the home team, but also the away team too in a good building like that. We're looking forward to the next one being like that too.
As for the loss, we take the positives from it and we kind of drop off the things we don't need and deviate away from our game. We work on that, but we'll look tomorrow at different things system-wise and we'll go from there. I think we know what we have to do as a team: We need to come with our game and work together as a group and put the work ethic in.