Panthers stay confident, rally for Game 4 win to push Lightning to brink

SUNRISE, Fla. -- They weren’t thinking about what might be, there on the bench. They weren’t considering the idea of the flight back to Tampa with the series tied and the regret and the doubts creeping in.

They couldn’t.

“You’re in the moment,” Brad Marchand said of the third period of a game that would quickly turn in 11 seconds from a 2-1 lead for the Tampa Bay Lightning to a 4-2 win for the Florida Panthers on Monday. “You can’t let your mind wander to what’s going to happen in the future, something that’s out of your control. The best athletes just worry about what is in their ability to control, and I think that’s all we were worried about, was the next shift, the next moment. But you can’t let your mind wander.”

To that point, the ups had matched the downs for the Panthers in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference First Round Amerant Bank Arena. The Panthers had scored first, as they had in each of the previous three games of the series, but saw the Lightning roar back with two goals of their own in 11 seconds in the second period -- one from Mitchell Chaffee (12:21) and one from Erik Cernak (12:32).

They had lost a defenseman, Niko Mikkola, to a game misconduct 19 seconds into the third period and been faced with a five-minute major to kill off.

They had seen a game-tying goal wiped off the board following an offside challenge at 7:02 of the third period.

Still, they didn’t doubt.

“You know, belief is a dangerous thing, and we had that. You could feel it," Marchand said. "So no, I don’t think that we’re sitting there on the bench thinking we’re going back 2-2. We believe that we can make a play. You’re one shot away at that time.”

Which was what made all that happened next make sense.

At 16:13 of the third period, Aaron Ekblad scored to tie the game.

At 16:24 of the third period, Seth Jones scored to give the Panthers the lead.

In their own 11-second flurry, the Panthers had turned their belief into action, the win giving them a 3-1 lead in the best-of-7 series with a chance to close it out and advance to the second round with another victory in Game 5 on Wednesday at Amalie Arena (7:30 p.m. ET; FDSNSUN, SCRIPPS, ESPN2, TVAS2, SN360).

Or, as captain Aleksander Barkov summarized it, “A lot of things happened, obviously, at the end in a good way for us.”

It was, perhaps, the most succinct way to put it.

“It was pretty much a roller coaster, but I feel like we were all the time able to stay pretty calm,” said forward Anton Lundell, who scored the first goal of the game at 9:06 of the second period.

But the Panthers wouldn’t have been there without the penalty kill, the five-minute penalty kill that could have put the game out of reach for them, that could have erased any chance for the late-game heroics.

“That was huge,” Lundell said. “It actually went pretty fast, I feel like. We did a good job of killing the penalty there, and huge shoutout to [goalie Sergei Bobrovsky] and all the guys who were blocking shots there. It was very important in that game, and I feel like we got some more momentum from that, and we got more energy and jump after that.”

Since scoring their first goal of the series on their first power play of the series, the Lightning have not scored on 14 straight power plays.

“It started with the kill,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “That was such an important piece to the game, but keeping that belief, you come out of it and you think something good is going to happen, and you get a power-play goal, and you think that’s what it is. Except it’s not.”

Because, with seven seconds remaining in the five-minute boarding major, Brayden Point was assessed a high-sticking penalty at 5:12 of the third, which led to the first Ekblad goal, the one that was erased after the challenge, which Maurice called “a kick in the teeth.”

They remained down by a goal.

Until they weren’t.

Ekblad’s goal came from in front of the net, on a rebound from a Sam Reinhart shot. The crowd had barely stopped cheering the first goal when a point shot from Jones caromed off the skate of Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh and under the arm pad of goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy.

It was a win born of their belief, of their calm, combined with the luck that a Stanley Cup-winning team always needs.

“When you go to the Finals multiple years in a row, you gain a lot of experience. A lot of the guys on the team have been through that,” Marchand said. “I’m not surprised that guys are calm in moments like this. A lot of veteran guys and you can just tell, even in practice, days off, the way guys carry themselves, they’re just really good pros in this room and very comfortable in who they are and what we have as a group. It just makes everybody calm around you when you have guys that feel like that.”

There would be a little time for celebration, but just a little. There is, after all, still one more game to win.

As Maurice sat at the postgame media conference, he glanced up at a digital clock, its letters glowing red at the other end of the room.

“It’s 10:22 on the clock back there, so we get it for another hour and 38 minutes, you get to enjoy this,” Maurice said. “It’s great. Locker room is great. And then you handle your day tomorrow.”