Installment No. 1 in an occasional series highlighting the most memorable game in which players participated as a member of the Penguins.
Player: Matt Cullen.
Date: May 10, 2017.
Game: Game 7, Round 2 of the playoffs.
Site: Verizon Center, Washington, D.C.
Result: Penguins, 2-0.
Significance: Victory moved the Penguins into the Eastern Conference final for the second year in a row.
Three stars: 1) Penguins G Marc-Andre Fleury. 2) Penguins RW Bryan Rust. 3) Capitals G Braden Holtby.
Having to go on the road for Game 7 would have been daunting enough.
Doing it after losing the previous two games -- including a humbling 5-2 defeat on home ice 48 hours earlier, during which Washington scored the first five goals -- only compounded the Penguins' challenge.
"When you go into their building for Game 7, everybody expects them to win," Matt Cullen said. "It's you against the world, as a group.
"We just had our backs against the wall more than ever. It just seemed like everything, from the outside, looked like it was probably Washington's deal to win."
His teammates, who had won the franchise's fourth Stanley Cup the previous spring, were aware of all that.
They just didn't let it bother them.
If anything, they seemed to draw energy from it.
"By that time, you had a feel for what made our group tick, and when we were dialed in and ready," Cullen said. "I don't know what it was, but the feel in the room before the game, I had such a good feeling that we were going to get it.
"It just had a different feel in the locker room. Just a different energy, as guys were so ready and so dialed and just seemed so determined. ... It's a focus that I don't know that I've ever seen before a game."
No one was more ready than Marc-Andre Fleury, who stopped all 29 shots the Capitals threw at him.
He did everything to make a victory possible except to score a goal, but Bryan Rust and Patric Hornqvist took care of that.
Rust gave Fleury the only goal he would need by converting a Jake Guentzel set-up at 8:49 of the second period, and Patric Hornqvist provided some insurance by beating Washington goalie Braden Holtby at 4:14 of the third.
"(Rust) scoring the first goal was no surprise, the way he had been playing at the time," Cullen said. And, of course, (Hornqvist) seemed to score so many big goals, every time we needed a goal over the course of those two years.
"Obviously, (Rust's) goal was huge, getting the first goal, but when (Hornqvist) scored that second one, at that point, we had played just an unbelievable game, from top to bottom."
While there would be other big moments that spring -- most notably, Chris Kunitz's double-overtime goal against Ottawa in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference final and a six-game victory against Nashville in the Stanley Cup final -- that game at the Verizon Center is the one Cullen remembers most fondly from his three seasons with the Penguins.
"The feeling in the locker room, and just the way we performed better than maybe in any other game, in my mind, it just spoke volumes about what we had as a group," Cullen said. "Going in there and playing almost a perfect game and coming out with a 2-0 win, that might be my favorite one.
"It's probably one of the games when I was most proud of our team out of those entire two (Cup-winning) years. The way we played that game after it looked like maybe we had let things slip away and playing the way we did, gosh, that one just stands out.
"I'll never forget the feeling after that game. It was just such a good feeling, playing that well when everything looked like it was going to go the other way."
