Canada sweats out OT win over Sweden in 4 Nations Face-Off opener
MONTREAL — Here came the return of best-on-best hockey and here came the wall of noise at the Bell Centre, crashing down in delirium over the ice.
They roared for Sidney Crosby. They got louder with the introduction of legends for each of the four teams competing at this best-on-best renewal. They lost it for Mario Lemieux. They belted “O Canada” so loud it drowned out the singer.
They watched Team Canada beat Team Sweden, 4-3, to open the 4 Nations Face-Off on Wednesday in a game that went 360 degrees from blowout to blown lead to ecstasy in the form of Mitch Marner’s overtime winner, then they lost it some more.
The Galacticos here were Cale Makar, Nathan MacKinnon, Crosby and Connor McDavid. This was about the foursome that delivered a spellbinding power-play goal 56 seconds into the match with McDavid feeding Crosby feeding MacKinnon into an open net.
And this was about Team Canada, in Canada, giving a loud reminder of what hockey supremacy looks like.
Sweden did not record a shot on goal until 15:15 into the match, when Gustav Forsling’s wrister went harmlessly into Jordan Binnington’s glove. By then, Canada had already scored twice, the crowd had already started singing “Ole” and McDavid had already put in a handful of shifts where he looked like a man among boys.
It looked like this would be easy.
It was not.
It would take overtime in the end, meaning Canada took just two of three points, with Sweden getting one, and it would take Marner, finishing a pulsating overtime period by ripping a shot past Filip Gustavsson.
This was the sort of game — and the sort of finish — that left everybody in the vicinity needing a cigarette.
Canada never turned this into the sort of blowout on the scoreboard that it looked like on the ice for the first 20 minutes, with the game settling down, Sweden finding traction and turning this into a real game just like that.
The first sign of trouble came midway through the second period when Binnington let up a short-side goal from Jonas Brodin, making a game Canada had owned almost completely 2-1.
Indeed, the worries about Canada’s situation in net were validated more than a little bit, with Binnington less than convincing.
A new one cropped up, too, in the form of Shea Theodore leaving the game early in the second with an apparent right wrist injury and not returning, leaving the Canadians with five defensemen the rest of the way.
Crosby appeared to restore order when he delivered his second assist of the night at 17:28 of the second, feeding Mark Stone off the rush after wheeling around at the bottom of the circle to pick out a perfect pass.
But things continued to get unsettling for Canada when Adrian Kempe strode into the slot and beat Binnington clean to make it 3-2 less than two minutes into the third.
And when Joel Eriksson Ek followed a Canadian icing by tying the game at three off Jesper Bratt’s cross-crease feed at the 8:59 mark, a pall of silence temporarily fell over the Bell Centre.
That was enough to send it to overtime, where the noise would be restored in due course.
There were worries in the run-up to this event about atmosphere and crowd size. There was talk of the Americans being slight favorites over Canada.
Rarely has conventional wisdom been proven so wrong, so fast.
Even Brad Marchand, long a villain around here, got roars when he finished Brayden Point’s feed off the rush to score Canada’s second goal at the 13:15 mark of a first period during which the “away” team played 20 minutes of perfect hockey.
You could scour the tape for hours and not find a flaw in Canada’s game.
Its gaps were tight. Its breakouts were flawless. Its puck movement was clinical. It won nearly every puck on the walls. It was on another level to a Sweden team that is packed with stars in their own right.
This was what best-on-best hockey should look like.
