Panthers display calm confidence on verge of 2nd straight playoff upset

SUNRISE, Fla. -- The cheers could be heard through the closed door of the Florida Panthers dressing room. The music spilled out from the back rooms. This, coach Paul Maurice said, would be a night that the Panthers could enjoy, with a day off ahead, before they get right back to work in their effort to close out the Toronto Maple Leafs and advance to the Eastern Conference Final.

Because, despite all odds, despite all predictions, despite all expectations and the slimmest of margins that saw the Panthers getting into the Stanley Cup Playoffs at all, they are one win away from the conference final, five wins from the Stanley Cup Final.

Courtesy of a Sam Reinhart goal 3:02 into overtime, the Panthers beat the Maple Leafs 3-2 at FLA Live Arena on Sunday, going up 3-0 in the best-of-7 second-round series. They will get a chance, at home, to finish the series in Game 4 on Wednesday.

So how did he feel when that puck went in off Reinhart's stick?

"Oh, pretty good," Maurice quipped.

It was the Panthers' sixth consecutive win in the playoffs, with three of those coming in overtime.

"There is no quit," captain Aleksander Barkov said. "We work really hard. We believe in each other. That's what it takes."

It's not exactly what anyone would have expected after Game 4 of the first round, when the Panthers were down 3-1 in the best-of-7 series to the Boston Bruins, when the best regular-season team in hockey needed just one win to send the Panthers packing.

They never got it.

Instead, the Panthers have smothered the Maple Leafs' biggest offensive stars, have ridden rejuvenated goalie Sergei Bobrovsky and have turned their season, and the narrative, on its head.

"It doesn't get much better," forward Anton Lundell said.

RELATED: [Complete Maple Leafs vs. Panthers series coverage]

The teams went into overtime tied 2-2 after the Panthers had gotten two excellent chances in the final five minutes, one a between-the-legs attempt from Sam Bennett that he didn't land and one a look from Nick Cousins that flew nowhere near the net.

And then it was on, with a chance for greatness from the Panthers, who have believed in themselves and their potential when no one else did.

"I think we had like 25 guys who wanted to score the winning goal," Lundell said.

In the end it was Reinhart, a sequence that started behind the Panthers net when Aaron Ekblad sent the puck to Reinhart at the offensive blue line. He pulled it back, circled into the neutral zone before slicing through two Maple Leafs and around a third, bouncing the puck off the boards to Lundell.

"I was able to find him off the bank," Reinhart said. "He handled it really well and gave me a lot of space underneath."

Lundell sent it right back along the boards, with Reinhart collecting the puck and stuffing it between the legs of goalie Joseph Woll, pressed into duty earlier in the game because of an injury to Ilya Samsonov.

"He went from 1-on-1 to 1-on-5 into a hole," Maurice said. "But that was the change of sides, right? That's really impressive, draw people to you, release them and then go to open ice. He does that a lot in the small areas of the game that you almost have to watch on video, right? Just take his line shifts, his puck support and his recognition of the flow of play is just incredibly good."

And then they celebrated, spilling out onto the ice for a brief moment of joy.

"It's in overtime, of course, you see the goal, it's kind of relief, the emotions," Bobrovsky said. "It's a big win."

But despite the music and the cheering, despite the in-the-moment celebration and the yelling and the hugs, after the game, the Panthers put on a publicly neutral face. They talked about a period at a time, a win at a time, about taking each day as it comes.

They didn't want to talk much about being up 3-0 in the series, about how close they now are to moving on to that Eastern Conference Final.

"I don't think it's time to think about that," Barkov said. "You've just got to go day at a time, game at a time. That's our mindset. That's my mindset. I don't think about how nice it is to be in what kind of position."

And yet, here they are. The music is playing. The locker room is their haven.

The game-winner was theirs. The win was theirs. One more and the series, and a spot in the Eastern Conference Final, will be theirs too.