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Greg Cote: For Panthers, it's now Stanley Cup or historic defeat in a Game 7 for the ages

Greg Cote, Miami Herald on

Published in Hockey

The most exciting and most dreadful two words in all of sports are headed to South Florida on Monday night, and those two words will offer one team unparalleled joy and the other deepest agony — both extremes bone-deep and eternal.

Game 7.

It’s a wonderful thing for fans. Unless your team is in it.

Then it’s a test of faith and belief and luck, enough to make an agnostic pray.

Florida Panthers fans will fill the Sunrise arena hoping for euphoria never before experienced, but aware they might head home dejected like never before, maybe in tears. And maybe embarrassed?

Because their hockey team will either lift the NHL’s Stanley Cup championship trophy for the first time in 30 franchise seasons … or suffer a loss of epic, historic magnitude — what by one measure would be the sport’s worst defeat in more than 80 years.

 

Florida led its best-of-7 series with Edmonton 3-0, once. In Panthers fans’ group chats there was speculation when and where the championship parade might be held.

Then the Oilers won three in a row, capped by Friday night’s 5-1 Game 6 win in Edmonton.

Warren Foegele’s goal 7:27 into the game on a pass from Leon Draisaitl beat Sergei Bobrovsky into the upper corner of the net. The metrics say Bob stops everything at ice-level but is susceptible when the shots are higher, and Foegele went textbook.

Adam Henrique did the same, top-shelf left, to make it 2-0, just 46 seconds into the second period.

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