History tells you one thing and one thing alone about Game Six - that the pressure was on both teams. For the Flames to win the Cup, and for the Lightning to force game 7…

Of course, some Lightning fans were in denial… Take a look at this clown…

If you were to tell me that the Lightning were under the most pressure to perform tonight, I would have to disagree with you.

– John Fontana, Webmaster Boltsmag.com in a post titled Pressure Point

Ok, ok, so I was deluding myself. This was it — this was the season right here…. Game Six, their house, the Cup was in the building. You had two sore and aching teams fighting things out. One for a chance at Lord Stanley’s Cup and one for the right to live another day… To bring things home for a once-and-for-all battle in their house, with their fans stringing them along any way that they can.

And if you were a Lightning fan, no matter how confident you were, you had anxiety and anxiousness seeping through your gut. This is a Tampa Bay franchise after all, which means that close-but-not-quite was supposed to be in their resume along with boatloads of mediocrity in the past.

Yeah, doubt rang through our souls….

And thent he game went to overtime…. I’m trying to remember if I had any finger nails left by this point… Well, I said I didn’t in the game thread…

I don’t know… I could ramble on about the pressure being on and only pointing back to old threads. Ray Borque gets the impromtu assist for the Lightning lasting this game out, telling the Bolts in a phone call to hang in there and inspiring them…

But leading into it, there is no pressure like being on the brink… And no point trying to deny it.

One day and one year ago, the entire city of Calgary was on edge. The entire nation was eagerly anticipating that nights game, as the Calgary Flames had a chance to bring the Cup home.

The game ended up exactly as the entire series had gone: extremely tight, with neither team giving an inch. While the history books will record this one as a Lightning OT win, in Calgary, there is only one way to describe this game:

It was in.

With nine minutes left, Martin Gelinas’ shot went in and out of the net so fast that nobody on the ice even saw it. If a Flames player or a referee had seen it, and called for a review, there is no doubt in my mind that Gary Bettman would have handed the Stanley Cup to Jarome Iginla that night.

But, the game moves faster than the eye some times, and it was not to be. Replays suggest that Gelinas scored, but by the time they could be looked at, play had resumed and the argument became moot. One more inch perhaps, and someone would have realized. The red light would have come on, a city would have gone mad.

We were literally one inch from the Stanley Cup.

Glen Sather liked what he saw…. I’ll let your opinions of Sather hold sway over how good or bad something like that…

The only comment I am putting up with this is that if the League does too much tinkering, they will alienate their base that they are counting on when the next NHL season begins (whenever that is). The base - which is sorely eroded thanks to Gob and Bary - can’t be left clueless by the game they are witness to when the league relaunches or the road back will be even longer than those in power hope it will be.

Pat Quinn also spoke of the disadvantage fo a wide-open system:

”If we’re just going to throw the puck down (the ice) and play like basketball - zone sort of hockey - I’m not interested in that,” he said.