Flyers 2, Bruins 1.
Game 7, tomorrow night in Boston.
And now this Michael Leighton is leading them. Starting in his first NHL playoff game, joining the series in the middle of Game 5 after an injury to Brian Boucher, playing for the first time in nearly 2 months after suffering a high-ankle sprain, Leighton shut out the Bruins for 59 minutes of Game 6.
They built a wall in front of him after he arrived in the second period of Game 5. The Flyers could not manage the same thing last night. From late in the first period on, the Bruins - obviously pretty proud and pretty sick of the way they have been nudging their way into the pages of history - had the overall better of the play.
They pushed. They tested.
And Leighton saved the night.
He is playing in the biggest games of his life. For the record, he says his biggest NHL start before this one was in the Winter Classic against these self-same Bruins. Before that, he said, it was in the seventh game of a 2008 Calder Cup series when he played for the Albany River Rats against the Philadelphia Phantoms. Leighton lost that one and lost a series in which he allowed only 10 goals in seven games. Earlier in that series, Leighton lost a five-overtime game in which he made 98 saves.
He is playing hurt, too. The ankle pain isn't enormous, he said, but it is there.
"For me, even to get on the bench [in Game 5 on Monday night in Boston], I felt proud of myself and the work that I did, and the trainers, to get my back on the ice . . .
"I can feel it. It's there. It's not going to go away for a while, until I can take a lot of time off."
