About halfway through the trip, their car struck a deer and ended up in the ditch. The deer ran away, the bumper was damaged, but the car was drivable so they were able to continue their journey.
When they arrived in Edmonton, they had to change hotel rooms because of bed bugs, and Mullin feared the trip was cursed. The line was too long to see Shania Twain perform at the pregame concert, but what happened next changed everything.
Just before puck drop, they were approached by a couple who asked if they had tickets for the game. When they said no, they were offered seats in the front row by the glass.
“How do I feel? Grateful?” Mullin, a hockey commentator, told the Associated Press by phone on Sunday. “Complete strangers gave us this opportunity out of the blue.”
Audrey was given a puck during warmups that was passed to her by a young boy, possibly Corey Perry’s six-year-old son, Griffin, who did the same thing to another fan before Game 3 after receiving it from his father.
“We were completely overwhelmed,” Mullin said. “It’s a really nice, generous gesture.”
Then Shawn and Audrey saw the Oilers’ 8-1 victory up close that kept the series alive. When she woke up the next morning, her Father’s Day card to him was a list of the “Top 5 Things About My Dad,” and the first one was, “He’s Always There.”
“It’s going to be hard to ever top that — very hard to ever top that,” Mullin said. “Even though things get more and more unclear as we get older, that’s one of those things that’s going to stay with us for a long, long time.”
Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky showed no signs of a Game 4 hangover when his team returned to the ice for practice on Monday.
Bobrovsky made a spectacular save that had his teammates howling with joy during practice, two days after he was ejected from Florida’s 8-1 loss in Edmonton on Saturday night.
Florida coach Paul Maurice knew Bobrovsky would be fine, especially since the Panthers didn’t blame their starting goalie for the loss.
“There’s no turning back,” Maurice said. “It’s not that we were outstanding and he had a rough night. I took him out of there because he didn’t want anything to do with the positive things that could happen.”
The Panthers could exceed the one million mark in attendance for the entire season for the first time on Tuesday evening.
Florida drew 763,931 fans during the regular season and sold another 216,273 tickets during the playoffs, bringing the total to 980,204 in the 2023-24 season (before Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final).
To reach this milestone, 19,796 fans must be present on Tuesday.
Edmonton’s seven-goal victory in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final marked the seventh time in franchise history that the Oilers won a playoff game by such a margin and the first time in a title series game.
The Oilers’ playoff record is ten goals, a 13-3 win over Los Angeles in 1987. In 1985 they beat Chicago by nine goals, and in 1983 they beat Calgary by eight goals twice in four days.
The other seven-goal wins before Saturday were against Winnipeg in 1984 and Los Angeles in 1990.
Whyno reported from Edmonton, Alberta.
AP NHL Playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://www.apnews.com/hub/NHL
