Only weeks into this NHL season that nearly wasn’t, Adam McQuaid wasn’t worried about being locked out and he wasn’t worried about beating the Pittsburgh Penguins, as he did last night, either.
Adam McQuaid was worried about being laid out in a hospital bed because that’s where he was — lying in Mass. General wondering why his arms were so swollen they looked like Popeye’s and doctors he’d never seen before were hovering around him shaking their heads.
As it turned out, the Bruins defenseman who scored perhaps the most improbable winning goal in a most improbable sweep of the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Eastern Conference finals was suffering from Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. If you think that sounds bad, you’re right, which is why when the season finally began McQuaid wasn’t thinking about scoring a goal like he did at 5:01 of the third period last night, slamming a slap shot past Penguins goalie Tomas Vokoun that was all the Bruins needed to win 1-0 and advance to the Stanley Cup finals for the second time in three years.
He was thinking about sitting up in bed.
“I guess personally, you know, in December I wasn’t thinking too much even about playing hockey,” McQuaid said. “It was just trying to get back healthy. It’s definitely nice to see how things come full circle like that.”
Where they came from was a life-threatening battle with his body, which had begun to produce blood clots at an alarming rate. The problem surfaced during the first week of workouts over at Bright Hockey Center at Harvard, where the Bruins were holding unsupervised workouts with a lockout looming that would ultimately cost them half the season.
McQuaid would need two operations, the first to remove a clot from near his collarbone and the second to ensure the problem would not arise again. That required the removal of a rib and a portion of his neck muscles and ensured McQuaid would not have been skating had the season begun on time.
That it did not turned out to be a blessing. McQuaid is one of the few players who could argue he actually benefited by the owners’ onerous business decision to enrich themselves on the back of their players.
Had the season begun on time, McQuaid would not have been ready. But because of the lengthy lockout, when the first puck finally dropped Jan. 19 McQuaid was there . . . just as he was last night.
When this series began McQuaid was elsewhere, finding his face flattened into the glass from behind in the early moments of Game 1’s second period by the Penguins’ Chief Goon in Residence, Matt Cooke. Cooke ended up with a five-minute major and a game misconduct but otherwise played on. Fortunately for the Bruins, so did McQuaid.
“We said in the playoffs it’s about the team, and everyone steps up at one point or another, and tonight it was Quaider,” forward Patrice Bergeron said. “He’s one of those guys that you don’t necessarily see that often on the score sheet, but he does his job. And the way that he plays goes a long way, especially in the playoffs, and tonight was his turn to score that big goal.”
His turn came when, in the midst of a line change, Brad Marchand saw the puck and jumped on it. For an instant he thought he might take off with it but realized on this occasion it needed to go over to the big defenseman across the ice who seldom shoots.
“I knew there were a couple guys coming off the bench,” Marchand said. “I wanted to test the defenseman a little bit but there wasn’t much there so I let it go (to McQuaid).
“I was kind of looking back and saw him wind up and shoot it and heard the crowd.”
Marchand didn’t need to see the shot fly over Vokoun’s right shoulder and just under the crossbar for what would become the goal that swept away the Penguins. What Marchand heard was the primal roar of 17,565 fanatics who had just seen the impossible. They had just seen their Bruins take the lead again against the most dangerous team in hockey on a goal by the most unlikely man to do it, someone who two nights earlier was the only Bruin not taken in a media pool to select who would be the winning goal scorer.
“It’s so rewarding for him because he went through such a tough time, like all that sickness or virus,” defenseman Dennis Seidenberg said. “I don’t know what it was but for him to come back like that and play solid hockey and score that big goal is big.
“I guess that’s what the playoffs are all about; different guys stepping up at different times. Tonight it was Quaider. It was an unbelievable shot from the blue line.”
It was an unbelievable shot from someone not long ago facing an unbelievable medical condition, a shot that was good for an unbelievable sweep of the unbelievable Pittsburgh Penguins. Maybe not quite a fairy tale, but close enough.