With shots hard to come by for both teams early on, the Flames broke through late in the first period when Adam Ruzicka beat Spencer Knight on the power play to make it 1-0 at 15:13.
Doubling the lead for Calgary, Nikita Zadorov jumped up in the rush and fired a shot from the top of the left circle into the back of the cage to make it 2-0 just 50 seconds into the second period.
"I felt we were tentative in the first," Panthers head coach Paul Maurice said. "I didn't feel they were any better than we were, it was just a tentative first period. That does us no good. That's not the game that we want to play, but I thought that we got to the game that we want to play."
Getting the Panthers on the board with a great individual effort, Colin White chased down Jacob Markstrom behind the net, stripped the puck from the Flames goaltender and then swiftly tucked a wrap-around into the abandoned cage for a sweet goal to cut the deficit down to 2-1 at 3:30.
Fired up following a fight from Ryan Lomberg and on the power play after Radko Gudas drew a penalty, the Panthers managed to pull even when Sam Reinhart capped off a surgical passing sequence by beating Markstrom with a quick shot from the low slot to make it 2-2 at 10:55.
Putting the Flames back on top and earning the first multi-goal game of his career, Ruzicka connected on a heavy shot right off a faceoff win in the offensive zone to make it 3-2 at 12:58. Eetu Luostarinen got the game deadlocked again for the Panthers early in the third period when he jumped on a puck in the blue paint and tapped it across the goal line to make it 3-3 at 1:12.
Getting the lead back for the Flames, Blake Colemen went five-hole to make it 4-3 at 6:56.
Coming up in the clutch against his former team, Tkachuk, who was acquired by the Panthers from the Flames for a package that included the duo of Jonathan Huberdeau and MacKenzie Weegar, made it 4-4 when he re-directed a shot from Sam Bennett past Markstrom at 13:46.
"It felt like we were dominating and down 4-3 somehow," Tkachuk said. "They came out and they played solid at the start and didn't give us much, but then we took over at the start of the second period. It seemed like they were hanging on a little bit in the third. … It was back and forth in the third, probably a little bit more than we would've liked."
Following a scoreless overtime, Rasmus Andersson scored in the fifth round of the shootout to lock in the 5-4 win for the Flames.
"This was a tight, even game," Maurice said. "I don't think either team had a long stretch of dominance. We were pretty darn good there. I thought maybe it was a tentative first by both [teams]. We got going pretty good in the second period. It's one of those games that 20 years ago would've ended in a tie, and you would've thought that was right."
