Be honest: Who turned off the TV when it was 3-0 San Jose? If you did, find a DVD because this one will go down as a Wild classic.

I for one never, ever, doubted them. I kept watching, all you bandwagon jumpers!

Down  3-zip in the second period, the Wild executed a pretty incredible comeback against arguably the best team in the West. Sure, the Wild got bounces, like a 98-foot bouncing goal from the other side of the red line from Marek Zidlicky, but hey, as Mikko Koivu said, the Wild has suffered its fair share of bad bounces.

Funny quotes in the gamer on the center-ice goal that Zidlicky never saw go in because he flipped it into the Sharks’ end and went for a change.

Just 1:28 apart late in the second, Marc-Andre Bergeron (rumor has it that the goal will be changed back to Bergeron from Koivu on Friday) and Pierre-Marc Bouchard turned a 3-0 deficit to 3-2. Then Zidlicky scored from about center-ice with 7:37 left. The Wild, which didn’t have a power play in the entire game for the fourth time in team history, had to kill of a Cal Clutterbuck minor with 2:56 left in regulation.

Niklas Backstrom made two great saves in overtime (32 for the game) and finally, Koivu took Brent Burns’ rebound and scored with 13.3 seconds left in OT. It was Koivu’s first career OT winner, and he jumped up and down about four times after.

“We allowed them to gain confidence and some momentum and their gain was our loss,” said Sharks coach Todd McLellan. “From there, it was anyone’s game.”

But the Wild strangled this one away for a huge win. A loss would have been demoralizing as the postseason was beginning to look like a pipedream. But now, the Wild, which is still in a logjam, is a point from a playoff spot and heading to SoCal on a high for back-to-back games against Los Angeles and Anaheim.

I’ll be honest, I was going to do a huge Mikko Koivu’s got to step up story for Saturday, but the captain beat me to the punch. He had a great game, scoring the big winner on his fifth shot. He also had five other shots blocked.

The Wild’s defensemen were pretty solid in the final two periods, a far cry from the first period when the Sharks skated all over the Wild. Brent Burns and Kim Johnsson had two helpers apiece

The Wild took 36 shots against the team that surrenders the fewest in the NHL.

Bouchard, besides scoring a huge goal with 41.6 seconds left in the second, was plus-3. Dan Fritsche absolutely worked his you-know-what off from the first shift.

Most impressive about this one? The Wild was all over San Jose at the start of the second. But Boucher made save after save, several incredible ones. Then San Jose got a lucky bounce when a Marc-Edouard Vlasic shot deflected off Andrew Brunette’s skate and right to Joe Pavelski for his second goal.

The Sharks made it 3-0, yet the Wild didn’t get deflated. Instead of mailing it in, the team kept going at the Sharks and finally got a few breaks. Big, big win on a night where if it lost, you could pretty much begin the writing them off stage.

Apparently, by the way, Owen Nolan was very sick tonight. He played through it, but he got sick — so to speak — throughout the game on the bench. He only played nine minutes.

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OK, coming to you live high above the HP Pavilion ice. Craig Weller and Kurtis Foster out for the Wild.

Forgot to mention, Owen Nolan’s fiery face is still on all the San Jose Mercury News boxes around town.

Hey, look who scored twice for Calgary tonight.

OK, talk to you after.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Game coverage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.