Game 7 an improbable dream for Leafs

The Toronto Maple Leafs season has been an improbable journey from the opening night of this short, weird, unpredictable and fun season.

Why stop now? Why should Game 6 of their first-round playoff series make any more sense than anything that has come before?

Why not Game 7?

Take your pick for which makes more sense for the two goals in a tiny, perfect sub-section of the third period that materialized at the Air Canada Centre as if from pixie dust.

They came from nowhere and turned a taught, tense 0-0 hockey game against the big but not so bad Boston Bruins into a 2-1 Leafs win in the space of about seven minutes.

First came the opener, in which Dion Phaneuf found himself on the edge of Tuukka Rask’s crease — or about 200 feet from Leaf goalie James Reimer’s crease — when Nazem Kadri wheeled through the middle of the offensive zone.

It was there he collected a blind back-handed pass from James Van Reimsdyk, aimed a half-speed shot to the right of Rask’s net and where Phaneuf managed to deflect the puck behind the Boston netminder, who had been dazzling all night.

For Phaneuf it was the pinch of all pinches, but unlike his gaffe in the overtime of Game 4 it was a gamble that paid off perfectly for the Leafs and their oft-maligned captain and it gave the Leafs a 1-0 lead and crowd at the ACC a safe port in a storm; something that made their faith seem real.

“I went there and I stopped. That’s how I ended up there,” was how Phaneuf jokingly explained exactly what he was doing so far from his own net at such a critical moment at such a critical game.

“JVR and then Naz made a good play and I saw Naz get the puck and I figured I should probably stay there; he’s a very skilled player who finds ways to get a puck through and luckily I tipped it.”

It all happened in the space of a few seconds and so many things could have gone wrong. A turnover by either Kadri or Van Reimsdyk at that moment, high in the zone could have been disastrous. Phanuef would have been buried for venturing so far out of position on nothing more than a hunch.

But in Kadri’s mind it all made perfect sense.

“I saw ‘Neuf heading to the weakside post so felt I’d throw it there and he got a stick on it,” said Kadri who had gone four games without a point and seen his ice-time reduced from 16:03 in the regular season to 13:20 in the playoffs . “There was a big scramble in front and Rask was cheating blocker side so I thought I’d throw it to the open side.”

And the backhand blind pass?

“I was talking to him (Van Riemsdyk),” said Kadri. “He knew I was there.”

We’re not sure this is what Leafs coach Randy Carlyle had in mind when it came to playing low-risk, playoff-style hockey, but after he took his hands from in front of his eyes and saw the scoreboard he was probably fine with it.

But the Leafs’ few moments of wonder were just getting started. This was a team that had lost 67 per cent of their face-offs on the night to the Bruins, the best team in the circle during the regular season and again in the post-season. The Leafs were without Tyler Bozak, their best face-off man, after he was a very late scratch with an upper body injury.

Kadri has been a lot of things for the Leafs this season, but an ace on the draw hasn’t been one and now he was lining up in the Bruins zone against Patrice Bergeron, the best in the game and 14-5 Sunday night alone.

No matter. Kadri wins the draw — one of just three he won in the game — gets helped by Phil Kessel, who kicked it on to Cody Franson before driving to the net where the he gets an open look at a juicy rebound from Rask and buries it for the 2-0 lead.

In the space of time it takes to have a car accident the Leafs could not have defied a taller mountain of odds. Kadri wins the draw? Kessel drives the net? Kessel scores the game winner against the Boston Bruins in a playoff game?

Give me a break. Next thing you know fans at the ACC are going to start chanting “Thank you Seguin!” in a mocking reply to Boston fans who have been riding Kessel for his lack of production ever since the fateful 2009 trade that gleaned Boston the draft picks they turned into Tyler Seguin and Dougie Hamilton.

No need to mention that Seguin remains without a point in the series is there?

Inside the Leafs room their fight back from down 3-1 to force a seventh game is seemingly unfolding as they might expect, rather than the hockey equivalent of climbing Everest without oxygen.

The Leafs aren’t ready to admit anything special is going on here. In their minds they’re a fifth seed trying to come back to knock off the No. 4 seed.

They don’t necessarily see themselves as a team that started Joe Colborne (who described his game plan in his first NHL playoff game as “don’t screw it up”) as one of six players who skated in the AHL this past season in an elimination game.

And they are a long way in their minds from a collection of players that lost all six of their games to Boston last season by an aggregate score of 36-10.

They actually think they travel to Boston for Game 7 Monday and come home with a win.

“I don’t think we’d be here if we didn’t,” said Kadri.

It almost doesn’t matter at this point. Win or lose the Leafs have done something special already. In the space of four short months they’ve gone from something unknown and uncertain to a playoff team and in the space of six games from a rubbery-legged collection of playoff newbies to a group that has pushed the 2011 Stanley Cup champions to the limit.

“You could see (the jitters) in Game 1,” said Phaneuf. “But we’ve grown as a group and we’re going to continue to grow and that was another stepping stone for us.”

Step by step the Leafs believe they are building a pathway leading to something, somewhere. Who knows exactly where it will end? Who thought they would have gotten this far?

Let them dream the improbable dream.