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While the Boston Bruins beelined across the ice to mob him at the buzzer, Tim Thomas tapped both goalposts, sank to his knees and rubbed the ice in front of his empty goal.
Thomas drew a virtual line in his crease throughout these crazy, contentious Stanley Cup finals, and Boston's brilliant goalie just wouldn't allow the Vancouver Canucks to cross it whenever it really mattered.
After 39 years without a championship, the Bruins ripped the Cup - and several thousand hearts - out of a Canadian city that has waited four decades itself for one sip.
Thomas was just too good, and the Bruins are the NHL's best.
The Cup is headed back to the Hub of Hockey.
The 37-year-old Thomas made 37 saves in the second shutout of his landmark finals performance, Patrice Bergeron and rookie Brad Marchand scored two goals apiece, and the Bruins beat the Canucks 4-0 on Wednesday night to win their first NHL championship since 1972.
Thomas limited the NHL's highest-scoring team to eight goals in the seven-game finals, blanking Vancouver in two of the last four.
The oldest Conn Smythe Trophy winner in NHL history stopped 201 of the Canucks' 209 shots in the finals.
Thomas played overseas and in the minors before finally getting his NHL break in 2005.
The Bruins' postgame celebration centered on Thomas, who carried them through long stretches of a perilous postseason that began with two home losses to Montreal. The Bruins are the first team in NHL history to win a Game 7 three times in the same postseason, and Thomas posted shutouts in the decisive game of the Eastern Conference finals and the Stanley Cup finals.
Bergeron quieted the crowd with the first goal, scoring the eventual game-winner in the first period. He added a short-handed score in the second to keep the Cup away from the Canucks, who have never won it in nearly 41 years of existence.
Zdeno Chara, the Bruins' 6-foot-9 captain, nearly slipped under the Stanley Cup's weight when he skated away from commissioner Gary Bettman. And the shiny silver trophy eventually got a lift from Nathan Horton, the injured Boston forward whose Game 3 concussion on a late hit irrevocably swung the series' momentum to Boston.
Horton traveled to Vancouver for Game 7 and worked to give the Bruins a home-ice advantage, pouring a bottle of Boston water on to the ice in front of the Bruins' bench 90 minutes before warm-ups.
Luckily for the Bruins, their goalie is cooler than ice. Boston dropped the first two games in Vancouver, but became just the third team since 1966 to overcome that finals deficit.
"Their goaltender was real tough to beat," Vancouver coach Alain Vigneault said. "The way they played in front of him was real tough to beat. We had some Grade A chances, and we were unable to score."
Thomas thoroughly outplayed and outclassed his Vancouver counterpart: Star goalie Roberto Luongo gave up 18 goals in the last five games of the finals. Despite a pregame walk on the Vancouver seawall in his special mind-clearing ritual, the enigmatic netminder capped a brutally inconsistent series by allowing Bergeron's crushing short-handed goal to slip underneath him late in the second period.
（中國日報網(wǎng)英語點津 Helen 編輯）
About the broadcaster:
Nelly Min is an editor at China Daily with more than 10 years of experience as a newspaper editor and photographer. She has worked at major newspapers in the U.S., including the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit Free Press. She is also fluent in Korean.
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