In Edmonton , the Tampa Bay Lightning came out hot in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final on Monday night.The Bolts tacked up three first period goals, including two off the power play to push the Dallas Stars on their heels after 20 minutes of play.

“This was an emotional game,” Tampa Bay’s Anthony Cirelli said. “There were ups and some downs. It’s always good to come out with the win here. That’s one, and we [have to come out] hard next game.”

Lucky for Tampa that there were only 40 minutes of play left.

The Stars picked up a goal the middle frame and early in the third period to close the gap to 3-2, but that was all Dallas could muster.

“We’re in the Stanley Cup Final, you’ve got a 3-0 lead and you give up two; the one thing that this team has done is they just never put themselves in panic mode,” Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said. “Instead of trying to protect the lead, they went out there and actually they kind of took it to them. Not in the sense that we were trying to score, but we were completely engaged, it was really calm on the bench. It’s just our attitude. They don’t go through the waves of a game. There are so many emotions that occur through 60 minutes it’s easy to get caught up in it and they don’t. They knew the job at hand, the talk on the bench was to close this out, and that’s what they did.”

Tampa survived and evened the Final at 1-1.

“We had some good looks in the first game, we just couldn’t score,” the Lightning’s Nikita Kucherov (two assists) said. “I think we just stuck to what we have to do, keep it simple, shoot the puck at the net, get those rebounds. Just keep it simple, that’s the key to our success today and fortunately we got two goals today.”

Andrei Vasilevskiy made 27 saves, and faced 18 shots in the middle frame.

“Can’t say enough about him, what he’s done for us,” Cooper said. “Chalk another one up for him for outstanding tonight.”

Brayden Point and Ondrej Palat scored consecutive power play goals to give the Lightning a 2-0 lead.

“It was good puck movement,” Palat said. “Great pass by [Victor Hedman] and then [Kucherov] and I had an open net, so easy job for me.”

Kevin Shattenkirk added the third goal late in the first.

“We got back to what makes us successful,” the Lightning’s Victor Hedman said. “We got pucks deep, we got on the forecheck, we had some good opportunities. We scored a goal, obviously it was disallowed. I just liked the way we responded after they scored that second goal, really closed them out.”

Joe Pavelski potted the Stars’ first goal in the latter minutes of the middle frame.

“They had a push there,” Cirelli said. “I thought we did a pretty good job of weathering the storm there. … Whenever you can come out with a victory is a positive for us, so we’ll take some video, we’ll look at some good and the bad things, and move on.”

Mattias Janmark struck in the fifth minute of the third period to make the rest of the game more interesting.

“I’ll give our guys credit because they battled right back in the second period,” Dallas head coach Rick Bowness said. “We dominated that second period and [Vasilevskiy] had to make a lot of huge saves. So they won the first, we won the second and [Vasilevskiy] kept it in there, and then it was a pretty even third. But you can’t be doing what we did in the last half of the first period.”

Tampa was 2-for4 on the power play and Dallas was successful on only one of five power plays.

“When we stay out of the box, we’ve shown it so far, we’re a good team,” Pavelski said. “When we have to kill, and when you feed their top guys that kind of confidence … they get a little momentum. … We have to limit those chances, especially with their power play. We can kill one, two, three a night. We don’t need to be killing three, four a period.”

Game 3 is set for Wednesday night.