Alex Ovechkin said it best, or at least well. He said of the Toronto Maple Leafs, “They young, but they tough. They never stop.” He said it before Game 6, the game that could make the Leafs stop, after everything. It was scoreless for a long time, tense as hell. It went to overtime, for the fifth time in the series. It balanced on a blade. It waited.But in OT the Capitals were better. A lot better. They dominated, pushing and pushing, and finally after the Leafs were pinned into an icing, a Justin Williams shot landed in front and Marcus Johansson batted it home for his second goal of the game at the 6:31 mark. 2-1, Capitals. They advance. And then people cheered in appreciation — Go Leafs Go, and Fred-die, Fred-die — and the Leafs and Capitals shook hands. Hell of a game. Hell of a series. Hell of a season, all in all.To get to overtime, the Leafs needed to blow one last lead in a season full of them. With a little over 12 minutes left in this scoreless, dig-the-fingernails-into-the-armrest game, Morgan Rielly shot a puck into the Capitals zone, and it hit a seam in the boards and bounced so perfectly that it could have been a movie scene. Auston Matthews accelerated and glided and swept the puck up sideways in one motion roofing it past Braden Holtby with 12:15 left in the third period. 1-0, Leafs. The 19-year-old superstar had scored in a fourth straight game, and Game 7 was a dozen good minutes away.Except the Capitals started pushing back immediately, and five minutes later Johansson slipped up the middle against the Leafs fourth line and slipped a puck that bounced around the back of Frederik Andersen’s pads, and it was tied. Back to the start.It had been unlike any game in the series: more wide open than Game 5, lower scoring that every other one. Nobody scored, and if you were tense, it might have felt like overtime had just started early. In the end, it started on time. For a long time the Leafs were better, but Washin ...
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