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Detroit Red Wings: #4 Moment of 2014-’15 Season

By Gwen De Young

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The Detroit Red Wings never really had good luck in the dreaded shootout last season. It became a running gag for my friends that weren’t Red Wings fans, I got a lot of “Oh, I saw the Wings lost to the shoot outs again”, it wasn’t fun. Overtime for the Red Wings was a little better and so they couldn’t make too many jokes about that, so it evened itself out, sort of.

Well on February 21st the Red Wings went down to Dallas to take on a struggling Dallas Stars team who I thought were going to be a very good team that season. I was hoping for a good game. At the time I was going through these terrible health issues and four days earlier had just had surgery. It would later turn out to be brain cancer, but that day, the 21st, I remember coming home and being laid out on the couch for a few days until I got my stitches out. This was my first game out of the hospital and it was a nice distraction from everything that had been happening.

Detroit Red Wings
Detroit Red Wings /

Detroit Red Wings

I tuned into the game and watched all the pregame as I typical had done before. The game starts and 6 minutes I watched Johnathan Ericsson for some reason take on Jamie Benn in a fight. The Benn came back to net a goal past Jimmy Howard on a wrist shot. It was still pretty early, but wasn’t looking super great at that point. That was until Gustav Nyquist scored with about 3 minutes left in the first to tie the game up.

From there, things got interesting, like really, really interesting. See if you can keep up.

Pavel Datsyuk would score the only Red Wings goal of the second at the 9:20 mark and the Red Wings had a 2-1 lead at this point. optimistic Red Wings fan in me thought; cool they only need one and to play smart the rest of the game and they will win. Realistic Red Wings fan in me said, they better get a few more of those just to make sure they can stay ahead later in the game.

Then three minutes of absolute hockey hell.

From the 15:16 mark to the 18:16 mark, the Dallas Stars scored three unanswered goals. Goals by Trevor Daley, Cody Eakins, and Erik Cole dropped my hopes of the team winning this game down a few pegs and now I had to watch a miracle happen in the third period. Well that miracle started to happen pretty quickly. Less than a minute in Jakub Kindl scored and then a little under a minute later decided to do it again and the game was now tied. My hopes had went back up those few pegs.

The Stars fought back however, a Curtis McKenzie goal and then a Shawn Horcoff power play goal gave the stars a two goal leading heading into the second half of the third period. However the Red Wings charged back and found a way to tie the game on a deflected pass of Justin Abdelkader and then a fabulous backhanded goal by Datsyuk and the game was tied up.

While I wasn’t super happy about a game going into overtime mostly because I was tired and wanted to go to sleep, I also didn’t want the Red Wings chances of winning to lower because this team wasn’t good at over time or shoot outs. So I said my little hockey pray to the hockey gods and the puck dropped for overtime. In a quick 36 seconds the Red Wings got a win, I saw one of the best high scoring games I had seen in a while and it was all thanks to Niklas Kronwall.

In a game that seemed to be over by the end of the second, fans got to the Red Wings turn it into another gear and push the game into overtime. There they got to see the heroic goal scored by the veteran Kronwall. It couldn’t have been a better game to distract me from everything else going on in my life at the time and as I sat there on my couch the happiest I had been in the past week.

Next: Check out the number 5 moment of last season!

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