Game 1 was, indeed, a throwback.
And then some.
When the dust settled, the Flames had skated to a 9-6 victory on a wild, wacky, what-the-heck-is-happening-out-there? sort of night at the Saddledome.
Believe it or not, there had never before been this many goals in a playoff instalment of the Battle of Alberta. Even Wayne and Lanny and the boys didn’t fill the net like this, not in one game anyway.
This was a more likely score-line from a bad-weather edition of the Labour Day Classic.
“Missed a convert,” quipped Flames head coach Darryl Sutter, a stickler for defensive details, after the second-round opener. “We were told that it was a boring series last time (against the Dallas Stars), so I told the players yesterday they’ve gotta score 7-10 goals today, knowing full well that they’d probably score 5-8 and then we could win. So that’s what we did.”
