No, this night belonged to the Habs, and to their fans, who are always stoked before any game here at the Bell Centre by the extraordinarily powerful 10-minute laser show that showcases the great Canadiens heritage, and who were rewarded by an overwhelming home club performance that began with the superb goaltending of 20-year-old Carey Price.
Price had descended to the ranks of the mortal with a mediocre showing in Game 5, and he was not able to reach back for that little extra je ne sais quoi in Game 6, when an A-level performance would have prevented a Game 7. But this is a kid with a rare pedigree, a young man who led his team to the AHL championship a year ago. In his first Game 7, Price stood tall.
The Canadiens gave the chanting, singing, white towel-waving crowd of 21,273 plenty of chances to exult, whether it was Mark Streit taking a nice Maxim Lapierre drop-off and turning it into a virtuoso display of stickhandling before slipping it past Tim Thomas (to make it 2-0), or Andrei Kostitsyn scoring the first of his two goals by stuffing one just as Zdeno Chara was exiting the penalty box (3-0), or Kostitsyn firing one past Thomas at 17:58 of the third period (4-0), or, finally, brother Sergei Kostitsyn finishing the assault with that goal eight seconds before the horn sounded.
Let the record show that by scoring the final three goals the Brothers Kostitsyn finished this series the way they started it when they scored a quick pair to jump-start a 4-1 Canadiens triumph in Game 1.
So this series ended the way the book said it was supposed to, with the No. 1 seed defeating No. 8. But no one who witnessed it possibly could frame it that way.
"It was a really close series," said Chara. "Really, really close. It could have gone either way."
