Stanley Cup Final blog: Carter Verhaeghe

Florida Panthers forward Carter Verhaeghe will be keeping his own blog throughout the 2023 Stanley Cup Final against the Vegas Golden Knights. He will check in regularly with behind-the-scenes access.

In his fourth entry, Verhaeghe discusses Game 3, a 3-2 overtime win against the Vegas Golden Knights at FLA Live Arena on Thursday. Verhaeghe scored the winning goal at 4:27 of overtime and assisted on the tying goal by Matthew Tkachuk with 2:13 remaining in regulation to allow the Panthers back into the series. Goalie Sergei Bobrovsky made 25 saves after being pulled in Game 2, a 7-2 loss.

Vegas leads the best-of-7 series, 2-1, with Game 4 here Saturday (8 p.m. ET; TNT, TBS, truTV, CBC, SN, TVAS).

It feels great to get that win. I mean we just needed to win tonight, and it didn't matter how we did it. Going down 3-0 in the series would have been really tough. I don't know if any team has ever come back from that. So, to get the win tonight, it didn't matter how it happened. If they dominated us and we won or it was a close game like this, it didn't matter how it happened. We needed to walk off the ice with a victory. We are just happy to have this victory and make this into more of a series.

There wasn't too much of a celebration in the room afterward. It is another game and we got the win. Now we have another job to do, and we are going to start to think about doing our job in Game 4.

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Tkachuk is one of the best players I have ever played with, and you want to get him pucks in big situations like tonight when we need a goal late. I just wanted to shoot the puck toward him because I know, more often than not, he will do something with it. Like I said, he is one of the most unbelievable players I have ever played with or seen. We are a confident team, but to have him with us on our side, that just gives us more confidence. It was such a big goal, but he has done that for us all playoffs. Every game, he seems to do something special.

Our goalie was really good for us tonight, too. He was so important. I know people were wondering about him after the first two games but, for us, there wasn't any question, He is our guy. He has been unbelievable, unbelievably good for us. I mean, we have all the confidence in the world with him back there and we know he will show up in the big moments. That is what great players do and that is what he did for us tonight.

But, even with this win, our mindset doesn't change much. We have to get another win now. We just come to work every day, play hockey and go home. We believe in ourselves.

We changed a couple of things tonight, made some adjustments. We didn't run around chasing plays as much as we did in the first two games. But we don't really change how we play. It has worked for us.

For us, it is always about trying to find a way, like I said earlier, it doesn't matter if it looks pretty or not. It doesn't matter if we are dominating them or they are dominating us. The result is what matters. We focus on the process and tonight it worked for us, and we got a big win.