Ottawa Senators' goalie Pascal Leclaire is dazed after being knocked over by the puck during the second period of their NHL hockey game against the Toronto Maple Leafs in Ottawa March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Blair GableBLAIR GABLE/Reuters
Back up the bus - gently now.
C'mon out from under there, Pascal, you're starting tonight.
And so began one of the more curious Saturday night hockey games ever played in this country.
One day after it appeared goaltender Pascal Leclaire had been, as they say in hockey, thrown under the bus by Ottawa Senators coach Cory "There's no such thing as fair in hockey" Clouston for dubious play, the struggling netminder was back in business.
No choice, really - not with everyone else acting like Glenn Hall, who notoriously used to throw up before every game he played back in the years of the Original Six.
It was not, however, a case of nerves that struck Ottawa over the weekend, even though two successive losses had thrown the fickle fans of the Northeast Division leading Senators into a small panic.
It was, rather, the flu.
It pitted the Senators, plagued by illness, against the Toronto Maple Leafs, plagued by history, in a Battle of Ontario that could barely be called a skirmish. The Leafs ultimately won, 2-1, in a shootout that at times had fans wishing they could shoot themselves.
On Friday, three Ottawa players were down with the flu and excused from practice. On Saturday morning, seven were down, including the team's captain and best player, Daniel Alfredsson.
By game time Saturday, Clouston estimated that as many as a dozen of his players were either not dressed or else racing to the bathroom to undress as quickly as possible during the game.
"A couple of times you're calling a player's name," an exasperated Clouston said, "and he's not on the bench."
"I've never seen anything like it," said newly acquired centre Matt Cullen. "I've been 12 years in the league, and I've never seen that many guys run to the bathroom during a game."
So desperate were the Senators for reinforcements against the symptoms that had flown through the dressing room faster than if it were a kindergarten that emergency minor-league call-up Zack Smith did not even make it to the rink until the second period.
At game's end, several media refused to enter the weight room to interview players for fear they would also end up on the casualty list: beat reporter, day-to-day …
It made for a weakened Ottawa team, but this was hardly the Toronto Maple Leafs, either, given that injury and trades had necessitated a lineup far closer to the American Hockey League than the NHL.
Had Hockey Night In Canada wished to contrast the brilliance of international hockey vis-à-vis the some time drudgery of regular-season hockey, they could not have picked a better match.
While the Olympics featured fast and mostly clean hockey, this game featured head-hunting when Ottawa's Chris Neil, who scored Ottawa's lone goal, put Toronto's John Mitchell out of the game with a brutal shoulder hit - an act sadly still considered perfectly legal in the NHL.
While the Olympics had no fights - you get kicked out of the game in international play - this featured a scrum at the end of every meaningless scramble and a number of rather absurd fights, for which of course the NHL offers no penalty at all.
There were, however, some small positives to be found. Toronto's Phil Kessel scored during the game and again in the shootout - albeit by a circuitous skating route that would have looked more natural on the Rideau Canal than Scotiabank Place.
And Leclaire, only two days after being yanked barely six minutes into a game against the Carolina Hurricanes, was back in net, by necessity, and excellent, also by necessity. Had Leclaire not regained some form, it seemed almost certain that the starting job now belonged to backup Brian Elliott, who was also down with the flu.
In an almost unbelievable coincidence, Elliott's personal streak of nine consecutive wins in late January and early February had started the day he replaced backup-to-the-backup Mike Brodeur, who had won two in a row himself before falling to an earlier flu bug.
This latest bug, however, was far tougher on the team as a whole. In the third period, the Senators looked to be staggering on their skates as the young Toronto players outshot Ottawa 11-3.
"We just seemed to run out of gas," Clouston said. "The legs weren't there when we needed them."
Fortunately, Leclaire was.
And a point gained when most of your players are rushing the toilet far more than the other net is a welcome point indeed.