Bolts hang on to even series with 4-3 win Lighting rebound from Game 3 loss

‘Hang on for the win’ seems like suck an over-used cliché in sports.

Except on Friday night when the Tampa Bay Lightning built a 4-0 lead then hung on for the win as the Pittsburgh Penguins scored three unanswered goals to make things tight at the end.

The final 20 minutes of the game were heart-stopping for fans but for Lightning coach Jon Cooper it was apparently another day at the office.

“When you play 40 playoff games in the last two years, you’re used to things like that, and we’ve been through these games before, as well as, I’m sure, Pittsburgh has,” Cooper said after the game. 

“You know, the one thing on the bench was it doesn’t matter how you get there.   So whether you’re up 4-0, it becomes 4-3, or you’re down 3-0 and you go ahead 4-3, it doesn’t matter.  You’re still winning.  So you’ve got to play like that,” he added. 

Game 5 is at Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh on Sunday (8 p.m. ET; NBCSN, CBC, TVA Sports). 

“As much as — or as how disappointed we were after Game 3 and have to turn the page, we did that, and I thought we deserved to win that hockey game tonight,” Cooper said. “Now, in saying that, we have to turn the page as well because this game, it’s over, and now it’s the best of three.  We can’t carry this over and say, oh, well, just because we won Game 4, we’re going to win Game 5.  Turn the page and get back to what we’re doing.”

 Ryan Callahan got things going early in the first period when he scored with 27 seconds gone in the game.

“We wanted to have a good start, and obviously when you score on the first shift it helps and it gets the team going,” Callahan said. “Overall, that was our main concentration. I thought we had a good start in Game 3 and let it slip after about 10 minutes. So it was important for us to continue that push and continue that momentum.”

Callahan’s earl score energized the entire building and Cooper noted that after the game.

“That’s the start we needed.  You can’t sit here and say, oh, you’re — you want your team to make a push.  You want them to say, okay, let’s make a stand,” Cooper said.   “We got embarrassed at home in Game 3, let’s make a stand.

 “And you can’t ask for anything more than Callahan scoring the first shift.  27 seconds in, everybody — I don’t think anybody sat down yet, and they didn’t need to. You can just — the energy in the building after we scored, it just pushed us, and we carried that through.  I can’t say enough about Ryan Callahan and his positive effect on our team.”

 Tyler Johnson, Andrej Sustr and Jonathan Drouin scored for the Bolts.

“I was trying to jump up the play there and beat [Pittsburgh’s] forwards up the ice,” Sustr said. “[Kucherov] made a great play through the defenseman and found me on the back door, and it was a little bit of an easy job to put it in the open net.”

 The Lightning took the 4-0 lead into the third period and then the Penguins found some life off a goal from Phil Kessel.

 “There’s no comfortable lead in this league,” Kris Letang said. “Sometimes things aren’t going to go your way and you have to refocus. We’re capable of doing a lot of things out there, but you have to have the right mindset. You saw that in the third period.”

 Evgeni Malkin and Chris Kunitz added goals in the final frame to make for an intense final few minutes in Tampa. 

 “If you look at the series, whoever is going to win the 50-50 battles and put pucks in deep [will win],” Kunitz said. “If you start turning pucks over, [Tampa Bay] is potent on the rush. They score goals, they like to spread the zone and hit guys late [with passes]. We have to do a better job to make sure we have the details down and putting pucks in deep and play more in their end.”