Brendan Gallagher was 44 seconds into a shift that saw him traverse the length of the ice three times before he scored the biggest goal of the Montreal Canadiens' season.
Without it, the Canadiens would’ve left UBS Arena without a point banked on a night that saw every team but the one they were playing lose ground to them in the Eastern Conference wild-card race, and that would’ve been tragic given the way they played the game.
They outshot and out-chanced the New York Islanders by a two-to-one margin but lost 4-3 to them in overtime. And though that outcome was lamentable, finding a way to come back from down two goals with 15:28 to play in regulation to salvage that one point and give themselves a chance at another was the opposite of lamentable.
Alex Newhook agreed when talking to reporters in attendance.
“At the end of the day,” he said, “I think it’s a big point on the road.”
Joshua Roy scored his first NHL goal in over a year to tie the game 1-1 in the first period. Patrik Laine scored his 14th power-play goal in his 38th game of the season to get the Canadiens back within one in the fifth minute of the third.
But it was Gallagher squeezing the last bit of gas he had out of the tank to get the Canadiens over the line, and, in a lot of ways, that was perfectly fitting.
He’s made a career of refusing to quit, of pushing through adversity and finding ways to deliver, and the Canadiens have made a season of doing the same.
It’s what has enabled them to turn a six-point deficit in the wild-card race on Feb. 21 into a two-point lead in it on March 21. No team has equalled their 8-1-2 record or 81.8 points percentage over that time, and no team has been as resilient within the games themselves (with the Canadiens picking up five of eight points when trailing after two periods).
Over the last two of those four weeks, Gallagher has been on the most emotional roller-coaster ride of his life — welcoming his first child into the world and seeing his mother depart from it within days — and hasn’t missed a game.
“When we were in Calgary (March 7-8), I found out she passed,” he said earlier on Thursday.
Della Gallagher had been diagnosed with stage IV brain cancer in August of 2021. She had been given six-to-18 months to live and she had fought valiantly for 42, passing shortly after Brendan’s wife, Emma, delivered granddaughter Everly Mona Della Gallagher.
“We have a little girl who shares my mom’s name now, that’s really special as well,” Gallagher said. “It’s been emotional, but like I said, I’m really proud of her and her fight and her courage. Everything she taught, everything I am, is from her. … She’s with us every day and there won’t be a day that I won’t think of her.”
Della was in his heart when he pounded it and looked skyward after scoring in Montreal’s 6-3 win over the Ottawa Senators Tuesday.
Then Gallagher flew west to attend his mother’s funeral Wednesday, and once again paid tribute to her by finishing his exhausting shift with the goal that ended up making Thursday’s outcome far more digestible for the Canadiens.
They didn’t like registering 41 shots to New York’s 20 and finishing with an overtime loss.
Coach Martin St. Louis said afterward, “It’s a game of inches,” but this one felt more like one of millimetres after Nick Suzuki’s second-period goal was called back on a review that would’ve required a scanning electron microscope for the average person to determine he was offside. Newhook’s third-period shot pegged the inside of the crossbar and appeared much less than an inch from hitting it and going in.
Still, the Canadiens just kept pushing.
Cole Caufield also hit the crossbar 2:32 into overtime. And Lane Hutson took a mad dash down the ice and had his shot stifled before Bo Horvat took it the other way and ended the game with 1:23 to go.
That’s three-on-three hockey for you.
It left the Canadiens frustrated, but this group has shown it’ll take a lot more than that to be discouraged.
“We had a ton of o-zone time, a ton of shots, it was a pretty decent game from our point,” said Gallagher. “Try to keep it rolling, continue to play good hockey and hopefully get in the win column next game.”
It’ll be against the Colorado Avalanche at the Bell Centre Saturday, and the Canadiens — “an extremely confident group,” according to St. Louis — will be ready for it.
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