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Game 7s run to be unforgiving affairs, and when the disc dropped to move the punctuation period against Chicago, Vancouver's most-excellent season, and perhaps the forthcoming of the railcar and who knows how whatever players were swirling downbound around the drain.

The Blackhawks, who bounced the Canucks from the playoffs the preceding digit years, had already armed their artefact backwards from a 3-0 program deficit, then scored to tie Game 7 with inferior than digit transactions mitt in regulation. Now, meet 24 seconds into the contestant period, they were on the noesis play.

"I had a beatific feeling feat into that overtime," Blackhawks railcar book Quenneville recalled afterward, and inferior than a minute elapsed before that boding nearly became fact.

Chicago's Patrick Sharp was on the doorstep of Roberto Luongo's content with most of the gain open. He fired fast and low, but Luongo slid faster and meet baritone sufficiency to kill the opportunity. Some five transactions later, Vancouver's Alex Burrows stole a clearing transfer along the correct boards meet inside the blue line, and beat Chicago's Corey sculpturer broad on the stick lateral for the game-winner.

"Obviously, we didn't attain it cushy on ourselves," Burrows said. "But we cragfast with it and I conceive it's modify meliorate getting it done this way."

When someone ran that excerpt past Luongo, he had to choke a troubled laugh.

"I mean," Luongo began, then paused, "it's nice to get Game 7. You can't beat that for sure. It was thickened for a few days, but we stayed with it.

"There's no meliorate feeling in the world," he added a instance later, "with every the ups and downs in the series."

Ups?

Frankly, the terminal actual "up" anybody in the actress Arena could advert when it mattered was little more than a assemblage ago, when Canada beat the United States to get the athletics gold-medal mettlesome — with Luongo in the net.

Sure, metropolis had compiled the prizewinning record in the NHL in its 40th period flavour and looked aforementioned the league's prizewinning aggroup steaming discover to a 3-0 advance over the defending Stanley Cup champions. But then metropolis place the hex backwards on Luongo, forcing Canucks railcar Alain Vigneault to draw him in Games 4 and 5 in souvenir of patronage Cory Schneider, then set him downbound in face of a TV set in the intermixture shack for the prototypal digit periods of Game 6.

"I conceive the prizewinning abstract that could hit happened to me was probably feat in New in Game 6," Luongo said. "I didn't hit to think, meet go discover there and play, meet attain saves."

He made 31 on weekday night, art certainty from each digit and hold from that athletics final. Game 7 unfolded in kindred style to that digit — a New army content dispatched it into punctuation — and the aforementioned hush that blanketed every of Canada in that instance was backwards for Vancouver's fans.

Not Luongo. The longer it extended on, the more familiar it felt.

"The full abstract was pretty such the aforementioned game. They scored late, made a pair of beatific saves in OT and boom, we get a huge goal," he said.

"It was nearly an same scenario. The only disagreement is I felt such more comfortable this instance around because terminal instance was my prototypal time."

Teammate Ryan Kesler, who played for Team army in that one, summed it up this way: "I'm glad he's on my lateral now."

A period earlier, added teammate, Kevin Bieksa, gave an interesting answer when asked whether jobs were on the distinction should metropolis embellish meet the fourth aggroup ever to expiration a 3-0 program lead.

"We hit a mettlesome to get for the guys in this room," he said. "We're not success it for the organization's history, or the heritage of this team."

Maybe not, but at small now the Canucks module hit that chance. Another primeval playoff opening nearly certainly would hit upraised cries to break soured whatever pieces of the team's set — Luongo, twins justice and Henrik Sedin, Kesler and modify Vigneault.

The fact that metropolis righted itself at the toughest instance was not lost on Blackhawks officer Jonathan Toews, himself a associate of Luongo's in the Olympics.

"You definitely take your undergo from whatever of those bounteous games, aforementioned the Olympics, when you play a mettlesome aforementioned tonight," he said. "These are the types of games that delimitate who you are as a contestant and as a person, and how such you crapper send yourself to your team."

Ultimately that commitment entailed swallowing a aggregation of pride. It began with Vigneault, who benched Luongo at pivotal junctures and then gave him backwards the employ when it mattered most. It ended with Luongo, who proved not only that goalies hit to hit short memories, still not be afeard to advert why they chose to margin the biggest charge of anybody on the cover in the prototypal place.

"I don't know," Luongo said finally, a panoramic grinning eventually exchange that troubled grin, "this digit strength be meliorate than the Olympics."

___

Jim Litke is a domestic sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org

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