TAMPA, Fla. -- Yeah, yeah, I know, there are a half-dozen hard miles still ahead.
But if these Penguins do, indeed, proceed to raise Lord Stanley's Cup for the fourth time in franchise history, I can already promise with reasonable conviction that no single moment in these playoffs will stand out for me as more powerfully symbolic than this:
It's got it all, doesn't it?
"Just a great play by everyone involved," Matt Cullen would say later. "And huge for us."
Yeah, it's got that.
It's also got the dogged defense, with Phil Kessel backchecking -- three words once considered grammatically incorrect in that sequence -- even though he was on a long shift.
It's got the attack approach, even though play begins 150 feet from the target, even though the obstacles were one of the planet's premier defenseman and a white-hot goaltender.
It's got one streaking forward supported by another, with Carl Hagelin matching Kessel stride for stride as perhaps only he and a handful of other humans can, then luring Braydon Coburn laughably out of position.
It's got Victor Hedman, who towered over the early phases of this round, getting overtaken, then dragging up ice, then lunging, then stumbling.
It's got Andrei Vasilevskiy putting the blocker to Kessel's wrister, but it's also got the trademark resiliency of punching and punching again, this on Hagelin's rebound while Coburn roamed off to buy nachos:
It's sublime. It's perfect, really. It's better than if Kessel had finished himself.
Because this was more than just the first and, thus, the pivotal goal of the Penguins' 4-2 flattening of the Lightning, And this, as a whole, was more than just taking Game 3 for the upper hand in the Eastern Conference final.
This was a team performing at a level no one else in the remaining field can rival.
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