2026 Stadium Series was 'one you’ll remember for the rest of your life'

TAMPA -- Jon Cooper strolled down the hallway in the bowels of Raymond James Stadium, left hand in his pocket, lit cigar in his mouth, smoke curling around him. He still wore his white suit, red shirt in a deep V-neck underneath, a nod to Tony Montana and Ybor City of "Scarface" that had spiraled. He shook his head.

It was understandable.

He -- and his Tampa Bay Lightning -- had just experienced as wild and wacky, as unexplainable and incredible an outdoor game as perhaps had been played among the 44 previous iterations. It was a game that included 41.8-degree temperatures at puck drop, a goal scored 11 seconds in, a four-goal comeback, a goalie fight, a shootout, all played in front of 64,617 fans.

“Games like that don’t come around very often,” Cooper said, after his Lightning had erased that deficit to win, 6-5, in the shootout. “The game had everything.”

The 2026 Navy Federal Credit Union NHL Stadium Series on Sunday, between the Lightning and the Boston Bruins, had begun as a germ of an idea more than eight years ago, back when Lightning owner Jeff Vinik put up a billboard as a send-off to those at the 2018 NHL All-Star Game, requesting what seemed at the time to be the impossible -- an outdoor game amidst the palm trees in Tampa.

Until a night when the impossible was made possible.

Asked if this was what Vinik envisioned, defenseman Ryan McDonagh smiled and said, “I think so.”

The Lightning had scored 11 seconds into the game, a goal by Brandon Hagel that marked the fastest opening goal in NHL outdoor game history, a goal that came not long after a full moon rose over the stadium.

Perhaps it should have been obvious what was coming.

Because the game turned with five straight goals by the Bruins, as they swarmed through the first period and into the second. As Cooper said, “All of a sudden it’s 5-1 and I wanted to get out of this and put a hazmat suit on. It was tough.”

It was only after goalies Jeremy Swayman and Andrei Vasilevskiy started taking swings at each other at 11:01 of the second period -- the second goalie fight in two weeks in the state of Florida after the League hadn’t seen one in six years -- that the Lightning started to push.

And boy did they.

“That was the game-changing moment for our team,” Tampa Bay forward Jake Guentzel said. “That’s what we needed.”

They would score four straight goals after that, three of them on the power play, two coming in a span of 23 seconds as the Bruins took three penalties in 1:42, creating consecutive 5-on-3s. That set-up Nikita Kucherov’s game-tying goal at 11:50 of the third period, sending the game to overtime and, eventually, to the shootout, where Guentzel provided the difference-making shot.

“Obviously a [heck] of a game for the fans, entertaining, good for hockey,” Bruins forward David Pastrnak said. “But, for us as players, we left a big two points here. Unfortunately, we didn’t get it done.”

They may not have. And they will go on to Sunrise, Florida, for their final game on Feb. 4 before the Olympic break lamenting what could have been. But even if they gave up the lead, even if they lost the two points, they were part of something so much bigger.

Because, ultimately, it was a night that felt worthy of hockey, of hockey outdoors, a night that brought the icy chill of northern nights on ponds to the usually temperate climate of Tampa. It was a night for toques and scarves, that frosty 41.8 degrees at puck drop.

It was cold enough that the ice crew had to warm the ice on Sunday, the potential for which NHL vice president of facility and hockey operations Derek King had called “bizarre” the day before, given how focused they -- and everyone -- had been on the chances the weather would be too hot for ice when the idea of an outdoor game in Tampa was conceived.

They needn’t have worried.

“It was perfect weather out there,” McDonagh said. “Felt like a classic outdoor game. The ice was great. The crowd was with it the whole game. … It was incredible. The way the game went too, it was a little bit of everything. I think if the fans were here tonight, they got their money’s worth and then some.”

And then some.

“This was pretty good entertainment, right?” Bruins coach Marco Sturm said. “This game pretty much had everything. Unfortunately, you know, we were on the wrong side. But what a start, we were down fastest goal against, probably. … Come back, had the lead, they come back, goalie fight. What else [do] you want, right?”

Because from the moment the two teams arrived, the Lightning coming in on trolleys in the latest version of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Creamsicle uniforms, the Bruins coming in wearing colonial-era patriots uniforms, both choices nods to their cities and their NFL teams, the show was on.

But as much of a spectacle as the game was, with its pirate ships and patriots, tiki torches and Tim McGraw, all the nods to a city that 24 hours before had looked like it was full of extras from the Pirates of the Caribbean film series in service of the annual Gasparilla Pirate Fest, it was something more: It was a game between the two hottest teams in the NHL over the past month, the 11-1-1 Lightning and the 11-2-1 Bruins. It was a measuring stick game, a four-point game, a medley of cliches that all said one thing, that this was a massive game in the brutally tight Atlantic Division.

It was worthy of that.

“I just don’t think you can get much better than this outdoor game in NHL history,” Guentzel said. “I think there’s a little bit of everything, down 5-1 to come back, get to overtime, then there was a goalie fight, I think you had a little bit of everything, the drama. Just, to what it meant to Tampa Bay to have an outdoor game. That was one you’ll remember for the rest of your life.”