Without quite the depth of skill and talent Tampa Bay has up front, the Bruins are nothing if not opportunistic. They benefited from a little help from Roloson, who let in three goals on nine shots and has started to look more and more vulnerable in his crease. But their chances came from the kind of pressure they mount on the forecheck, which had gone largely unchallenged until the teams came out for the second.
"It was a perfect first period for us, but then we began to sit back," Bergeron said. "It was about execution. We didn't execute."
That's when things changed.
Zdeno Chara is 6' 9" and 255 pounds, a mountain of a man with the reach of a California Condor. For much of this series, he's been afforded the respect a Norris finalist and physically intimidating man often is, but in the second period of Game 4, none of that seemed to matter to Tampa Bay forward Ryan Malone. The 6'4", 224-pound Pittsburgh native seemingly decided no Bruin should be exempt from the physicality. Malone's hit on Chara behind the Boston net seven minutes into the second helped get the puck to Teddy Purcell, who scored his third and fourth playoff goals just 63 seconds apart, beating Bruins goalie Tim Thomas for the first time at home in this series.
The tenacity rippled throughout the Tampa Bay lineup, as the Lightning leveled 19 hits through two periods against Boston's 10. It was off of one of those hits that Sean Bergenheim tied up the game for Tampa Bay midway through the period. Checking Bruins defenseman Tomas Kaberle behind Boston's net, Bergenheim, the league's leading goal scorer in the playoffs, gained control of the puck, turned and slipped a shot past Thomas, his third goal allowed on five shots.
"We said between the first and second period, 'Let's try to get the first goal, and you'll never know what happened,'" Gagne said.
The first goal breathed life into the building and into Tampa Bay. And a furious Lightning attack, which finished with 37 shots, did not let up from that point forward, using each and every Boston turnover as another opportunity to turn the tide of the game -- maybe even the series.
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