We talked about it as a team beforehand, how a win tonight would have made this game a great memory. To lose it, it stings.
It stings more than ever because those were two points that we really needed right now; I think that's what guys will kind of dwell on, but we can't do anything else tonight about it. When you lose a game, you want to figure out immediately, what you could've done to win it and there are, unfortunately, a lot of things right now.
It was one of those things where we wish we could have it back. It would make this moment a lot sweeter, but unfortunately, we can't. For tonight, we have to continue to enjoy this moment.
Everything leading up to the game was awesome. Those fans were rowdy. Even playing two-touch soccer in front of the fans -- a lot of Capitals fans traveled too -- and it was such a cool environment that I felt really fortunate to play in. That walkout before the game, it was special, along with the flyover, the fireworks, and having 56, 57,000 people in the stadium. And when the lights turned off and the cell phones turned on, that's a moment I'll never forget.
Giving up that first goal 2:11 into the game, that's not a recipe for success. More times than not, you're going to lose when you do that and you're trying to get out of that hole. And the earlier it happens in a game, the harder it is to get out of it and, unfortunately, they got the next one and they got the next one and they got the next one.
We have a few things that we look over at the end of the game and say, "Did we do this? Did it help us succeed?" I thought we put a lot of pressure on them in the first period and that goal hurt on the scoreboard, but I don't think it slowed us down mentally. We've been down one goal before. We've been down two and we've come back. There was never a moment in the game when we thought we couldn't come back from this.
That's the belief on this team and that's the leadership in this locker room. In order to come back, we've got to do a lot more things right.
There are a lot of guys in this room that enjoy playing with each other, enjoy playing hard for each other and, obviously, when the score doesn't go our way, it's unfortunate. I thought Carolina played a really good, clean game and played better than us tonight.
It's desperate times now. This is one of the best locker rooms I've ever played in -- probably the best locker room I've played in -- with the group of guys we have. I've really enjoyed it, and the turnover in this League is a lot every year and if you don't make the Stanley Cup Playoffs, things get broken up really quickly.
In order to keep this team together, we have to flip it around. We have to win games.
We'll try to enjoy this experience as much as we can and then we have to get back to work. It happens quickly. We've got a huge game coming up against the Detroit Red Wings at home on Tuesday. Right now, with the situation we're in, these were the two biggest points of the year and now Detroit is going to be the two biggest points of the year.
We have to go day by day and we have to learn from this game really quickly, but soak in what this environment was, share it with each other and look past what we can't control right now.
