PITTSBURGH — So much for talk that a team as young as the Pittsburgh Penguins couldn’t advance this far in the playoffs. So much for the speculation Marian Hossa couldn’t score big postseason goals.
So much for the New York Rangers, too, whose decided edge in experience meant nothing in a five-game series in which the Penguins’ superior talent made the difference.
Hossa scored his second goal of the game 7:10 into overtime and the Penguins rallied after giving up a two-goal lead to beat the Rangers 3-2 on Sunday and advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in seven years.
Sidney Crosby began a rush into the Penguins end with a pass to Pascal Dupuis, who attempted to give it back to Crosby. The puck trickled away but ended up on Hossa’s stick, and he beat Henrik Lundqvist from the slot for his fifth goal of the playoffs to end New York’s season. The Penguins won the second-round series 4-1.
“Sid was driving hard to the net and it kind of bounced off him and the puck just came up to me, and I just tried to shoot at the net — and it was a lucky one,” Hossa said.
The Penguins, the conference’s worst team two years ago, will meet the cross-state Philadelphia Flyers, the conference’s worst team last season, in the first all-Pennsylvania conference final.
The teams haven’t met in the postseason since the Flyers’ six-game victory in a 2000 second-round series best remembered for Philadelphia’s five-overtime win in Game 4, which occurred eight years to the day Sunday.
“You want a rivalry, there’s one right there,” Crosby said of the oft-contentious season series in which Philadelphia won five of the eight games. “It doesn’t get any easier.”
Hossa had only 13 goals in 55 playoff games before these playoffs, and general manager Ray Shero was asked repeatedly if he worried about that lack of production when he picked up Hossa and Dupuis from Atlanta at the trading deadline several months ago.
“For a guy that’s been criticized and known for not scoring big goals in the playoffs when it’s clutch time, obviously he scored an unbelievably big goal,” Dupuis said.
“I had some bad playoffs and I had some good playoffs, I can’t control what other people say about my playoff performance,” Hossa said. “I’m on a great team right now, and I can just enjoy the ride.”
The Rangers, down 2-0 but desperate to swing the series back to New York for what would have been Game 6 today, got back into the game by scoring twice in less than 90 seconds to tie it early in the third period.
Lauri Korpikoski, a 2004 first-round draft pick playing his first NHL game on a hunch by coach Tom Renney, scored 2:03 into the period with only the Rangers’ second shot in nearly 17 minutes.
Given life in a game — and a season — that was beginning to look lost, the Rangers came back to tie it against goalie Marc-Andre Fleury 1:22 later as Nigel Dawes scored on a backhander off Scott Gomez’s setup while cutting across the slot.
Hossa and Evgeni Malkin gave Pittsburgh a 2-0 lead by scoring about four minutes apart in the second period.
