Forward Pat Maroon, who won the Cup with the St. Louis Blues in 2019 before winning it with the Lightning the past two years, said it wasn't about confidence. It was about work ethic.
"Like [Cooper] said, 'If this is going to be our last game, make sure when you go home tonight, you can lay on your pillow and you can say you worked hard and gave everything you've got,'" Maroon said.
That the Lightning did. They didn't panic when leads of 1-0 and 2-1 evaporated. They gave the Avalanche only two power plays and killed them both. They scored a 4-on-3 power-play goal themselves. Andrei Vasilevskiy made 35 saves, and he's now 4-0 with a 1.75 goals-against average and .945 save percentage over the past three postseasons when facing elimination.
"That's how we want to play," Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said. "We know the dynamic skill set that they have. If we can stay disciplined, stay out of the penalty box, try to eliminate their skill as much as we can … We can't eliminate it every shift, because they're that good, but you just try to do what we can and grind it out.
"That's the way this team has won, and we're built to play games that are tight like that. We've had success in the playoffs playing that way, and we don't want to change now. So that was more like it, and we'll look to continue that."
For now, it's one win. That's it. The Avalanche still have two chances to clinch.
"We extended the season," Stamkos said. "That's what we wanted to do. We talked about one game at a time. It was a grind, but we found a way. Great effort, and now we've got to do it again."
But if the Lightning do it again, they will have won back-to-back games entering Game 7, when anything can happen. The pressure will be on the Avalanche to win at home and not become the first team to blow a 3-1 lead and lose the Cup Final since the 1942 Detroit Red Wings blew a 3-0 lead and lost to the Maple Leafs.
"You can tell in that room that there's still hockey to be played," Perry said. "We want to push this and see where this thing goes. There's no give in that room."