Oh, be serious. Of course they aren’t coming all the way back. No one does that.<\/p>\n
Well, almost no one: Four teams in Stanley Cup history have lost the first three games of a best-of-seven playoff series, then won all the rest. That’s right, four. Out of 210. Spanning a century.<\/p>\n
So, it’s one thing to appreciate — admire, even — the Penguins staving off a sweep by finally setting down the Flyers, 4-2<\/a>, in Game 4 of their first-round series Saturday night here at Xfinity Mobile Arena. And it’s quite another thing to see it as the start of something super-seismic.<\/p>\n Still, though …<\/p>\n “It’s huge,” Blake Lizotte was telling me a few minutes following the final horn. “Obviously, we wish we were in a different spot in this series, as it stands. But nobody wants to get swept, and I think the comeback starts with the first one. So it was good to get that one on the board.”<\/p>\n Mm-hm. Poignant and pragmatic.<\/p>\n Also, there’s this: The series now returns back to the correct end of the commonwealth for a Game 5 Monday night at PPG Paints Arena. And the maximum number of games anyone can win on that single night will be the same for both teams.<\/p>\n Dan Muse had been emphasizing entering this one that all that was needed was to take the next game — “Win one game,” as he worded it — and he’d modify that slightly afterward: “I think this group’s done a good job all year of just working to go from game to game, and that’s it. Great job by the group coming in here and finding that one win, but now we’ve gotta go back to Pittsburgh and do the same thing.”<\/p>\n The same things, actually. Plural.<\/p>\n Four things I liked from Game 4, and why they do, in fact, need to keep being replicated:<\/p>\n \u25ba THE FOURTH LINE’S BACK!<\/p>\n For one night and for the first time in weeks, really, Lizotte, Connor Dewar and Noel Acciari wound back the clock to their peak form seen over the season’s first four-plus months, a span in which they might’ve been the NHL’s most formidable fourth line.<\/p>\n It wasn’t just that Lizotte and Acciari set up Dewar’s empty-netter …<\/p>\n CONNOR DEWAR WITH THE EMPTY NET TO KEEP THE PENS ALIVE\u203c\ufe0f \ud83d\udc27 pic.twitter.com\/njVMH8fuBN<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Spittin’ Chiclets (@spittinchiclets) April 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n … by double-teaming Tyson Foerster just as he’d been hoping to corral and shoot a bouncing puck, though that must’ve been most satisfying.<\/p>\n “Six-on-five, we’ll always try to be aggressive when there are bobbles, anyway,” Lizotte would tell me. “But all three of us are aggressive by nature, and you saw the bobble, and all three of us went. It was very characteristic of how all three of us play.”<\/p>\n “I’m just taking off there,” Dewar would tell me. “I know those guys. I know they’re going to find a way to get me the puck there.”<\/p>\n Good stuff. But better stuff: When the fourth line was on the ice at five-on-five, the Penguins registered 14 shot attempts to the Flyers’ 3, a powerful indicator of outright possession dominance.\u00a0<\/p>\n Which also indicates … they’re back?<\/p>\n “Yeah, I think tonight we finally started jelling again,” Lizotte would reply to my asking that. “Not that we weren’t before. But we were really creating chances tonight. Just gotta finish them.”<\/p>\n “I feel like we felt like ourselves tonight,” Dewar would essentially echo when I asked him the same. “And it showed in the way we played.”<\/p>\n Not to stretch any of this too far, but this team’s remarkable regular season began, at least from my perspective, with the fourth line tilting the ice in a way we hadn’t seen with any supporting cast since the most recent Cup teams. And if these playoffs are to extend beyond Monday, it’d be appropriate if the renewed spark came from these three, as well.<\/p>\n \u25ba A NEUTRAL-ZONE SOLUTION?<\/p>\n I’ve spent the better part of a week bemoaning the Penguins’ failures at the Philadelphia blue line, in particular their relentless reluctance to dump\/chip the puck behind the Flyers’ waiting clothesline. As such, it’s only fair to point out that this game commendably saw … the same?<\/p>\n Eh. Not exactly.<\/p>\n No, they still didn’t dump\/chip unless there was no other option and\/or they needed to change on the fly. Which had me convinced from the outset the series would be over in a couple hours.<\/p>\n Funny thing: They entered the attacking zone smoothly and efficiently throughout the evening, and they did so, to an extent, their way, but also with two switches:<\/p>\n 1. Ilya Solovyov was in, Connor Clifton out, to prioritize breakouts.<\/p>\n 2. Those breakouts were executed with speed heretofore unseen in this series.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Fast, fast, fast,” Solovyov would tell me. “Get the puck and move it.”<\/p>\n “Everything had to happen quickly,” Ryan Shea would tell me. “Beginning with us in the back.”<\/p>\n Everyone benefited. The skates moved before the vital first pass, presenting multiple targets near center red. The passes were crisper than those of, say, Game 1 by a dramatic degree. The passes were being caught cleanly, rather than caroming all over creation. And because of all that, a lot of the stupid stuff was erased entirely.<\/p>\n “Overall, decisions were better as we navigated through the neutral zone,” Muse would say. “As we’ve done all year, we’ll continue to look at the things we liked from this game and try to carry them on.”<\/p>\n There wasn’t a change, though. More of a clamping down.<\/p>\n \u25ba HEALTHIER ALL-AROUND DEFENDING<\/p>\n The Penguins clamped down over all 200×85, by no coincidence, not just on breakouts. This was their most solid, sound defensive performance of the series, particularly at five-on-five in holding the Flyers to 17 shots and 34 shot attempts. Two odd-man breaks were allowed all night, but those were, as one might’ve presumed, while on the power play.<\/p>\n That wasn’t just the defensemen, by any means. The forwards tracked back with vigor and without exception.<\/p>\n It’s always wonderful to see Sid do Sid things like this goal off a preset faceoff sequence on the power play …<\/p>\n SIDNEY CROSBY, HIS 72nd CAREER PLAYOFF GOAL \ud83d\udd25 pic.twitter.com\/Lhr7k9y6df<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 B\/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) April 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n … and this Lionel Messi-level assist on Kris Letang’s\u00a0insurance goal:<\/p>\n Crosby \u27a1\ufe0f Letang<\/p>\n The combo that never fails \ud83e\udd1d pic.twitter.com\/RCKIfmKtjy<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 SportsNet Pittsburgh (@SNPittsburgh) April 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n Not mention that leaping screen. Wow.<\/p>\n “It’s all those little details,” Letang would say. “It’s not the crazy plays, the passes that find a guy on the back post. Sometimes, it’s picking the guy like, giving me time to pick my shot. It was an amazing play. It just shows you how much IQ he has on the ice. He knows what to do in every moment in every situation.”<\/p>\n Again, wonderful. But let’s recall that this all got going at Madison Square Garden this past October by having everyone involved in the backcheck, and that was evident everywhere here.<\/p>\n “We were pretty happy with our start in Game 3,” Sid would say of the team’s general comportment that night, “and we just wanted to try to do that again. Getting that first goal helped, for sure. They still pushed, still generated some chances. But I thought, between defending well and Arty and getting timely goals … we haven’t played with the lead a ton, so it was nice to have that.”<\/p>\n Can’t omit Arturs Silovs. His first playoff action<\/a> saw him plopped into a bubbling cauldron of boors applauding even the hits on their own players, big-board highlights of Philadelphia cheap shots on Mario Lemieux as if they’d occurred a month ago, and not to be outdone, their mascot mimicking the murder of another first by using a crutch to do the beating, then tossing the mythical cadaver from the balcony …<\/p>\n Gritty: 2 \u2014 DraftKings (@DraftKings) April 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n … and Silovs responded with 28 saves, a few of the A+ variety.<\/p>\n “He made some big saves,” Muse would say. “When his name was called, he was ready.”<\/p>\n His name will be called again Monday. Take that to the bank.<\/p>\n All this would’ve been infinitely more welcome before Game 1, but hey.<\/p>\n \u25ba OPERATING WITH CONFIDENCE<\/p>\n I could discuss the heightened discipline<\/a>, as well.<\/p>\n Or Shea, Letang and Parker Wotherspoon putting forth their best playoff each, with a special set of stick taps for Shea, the peak performer on either team. Can’t do this without the defensemen.<\/p>\n Or Rickard Rakell exercising some extra athleticism to pounce on Dan Vladar’s giveaway below the line, then pulling a Plastic Man to put it home …<\/p>\n What an effort from Rickard Rakell \ud83d\udcaa<\/p>\n \ud83d\udcfa: Penguins vs. Flyers live on Sportsnet pic.twitter.com\/sw9ZZ1tmx2<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) April 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n “I’ll take it,” Rakell would tell me with a small smile.<\/p>\n That’s because it was his first of the series. And as more and more members of the NHL’s third-highest scoring team get to share that sense of satisfaction that can only come from getting a goal — Anthony Mantha? Egor Chinakhov? Ben Kindel? — those intangibles grow.<\/p>\n “It’s only one, but I think it gives us some life,” Sid would say. \u201cI think that looked more like our game. It\u2019s probably taken us three games to look like ourselves a bit. So, I think that’s something that we can definitely build on.\u201d<\/p>\n Is it too late?<\/p>\n Depends, I guess, on who’s keeping one eye on the clock, the other on the opponent:<\/p>\n Crosby TOOK A RUN at Sanheim as time expired \ud83d\ude33\ud83d\udca5 pic.twitter.com\/EMfZ2zeutB<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 B\/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) April 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 Thanks for reading my hockey coverage. Which isn’t complete yet.<\/p>\n
Penguins: 0pic.twitter.com\/4ewdrzfzAj<\/a><\/p>\n