Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the April 17, 1967, edition of The Globe and Mail. It is being republished here as part of our Leafs '67 Today project.
The first period of the fifth game was over, Chicago and Toronto tied 2-2 in goals and in games, each with two wins in their best-of-seven Stanley Cup semi-final.
Down in the catacombs of Chicago's cavernous Stadium, down where the visiting athletes bathe and dress, the Leafs sat and rested. Some sucked instant nourishment from split oranges. Most of them had their skate laces untied. All of them mopped cold wet towels over hot flushed faces.
There was not much conversation, but there had been some. Pinch Imlach – gum chewed snappishly, worked up – had asked Johnny Bower, the starting goalkeeper: "You look a little shaky. Are you?"
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"I am a little shook," Bower admitted.
Imlach, a trifle reluctant, put it to the money player who has done considerable for him in the nine years he has run the Toronto franchise. "You want me to make a change?"
Bower was realistic. "Well," he said, "there's a lot at stake."
The change was made to begin the second period, Terry Sawchuk for Bower, the tall gaunt goaler they call Ukey in for the one who had a little finger smashed by a puck before the series began. Sawchuk had gone all the way in for previous games, two wins, two losses, very big in the wins.
Hawks pressed in the first two minutes, frantic action seething around Sawchuk. Bobby Hull pivoted 15 feet to Sawchuk's left, almost parallel to the goal, a practically impossible angle from which to score. Hull shot, high and hard.
The puck struck Sawchuk's left shoulder and knocked him down, another crack on the same shoulder with bile green bruises from two shots in recent practices. Other players skated around the Toronto net, watching – the Leafs in some chagrin, the Hawks curious.
Superlatives unlimited
Pierre Pilote, the Chicago captain, crafty, canny, got out his barbs. "How'd you feel, Terry? You should've let it go, Terry. Might've been a goal."
Bob Haggert, the Toronto trainer, skidded across the ice from the Toronto bench to Sawchuk. "Where'd you get it?"
Sawchuk, on his knees, "On my bad shoulder."
Haggert, leaning down, "Think you're all right?"
Sawchuk stood up, reaching around for his stick and gloves, a little defiant – "I stopped the shot, didn't I?"
It is Saturday's story, how Sawchuk stopped 36 other shots in Leafs'$2 4-2 conquest, frustrated the most insatiable shooters in the game, shut them out with the remnants of a young Sawchuk: down the glove, out the arm, over the stick, up the glove, shutting off daylight the shooters thought they saw – all a kind of desperate epileptic action.
There was a unanimity of superlatives for what at least one aroused witness insisted was the most monumental stand in goal since the Horatius of Roman legend denied those people access to a bridge.
"Like that guy Horatio," Imlach would say later, in gaudy tribute. "… Fantastic." Perhaps he wasn't slicing the salami too think, at that.
"Best I've ever seen Sawchuk," Billy Reay said in the muted Chicago quarters. Sawchuk has said he would like to finish his NHL career where he started it, in Detroit, close to his young family. The Chicago coach, still bouncy, had some sport with the idea of Sawchuk returning to Detroit.
'Kidnap him' – Reay
"If the Red Wings haven't got him signed to a contract," Reay said, "they should kidnap him."
Tommy Ivan, the neat Chicago manager, has a perspective that reverts to when Sawchuk game to Detroit, 17 years ago. "This was a throwback to Sawchuk in his heyday," Ivan said – this from the man who coached Detroit in Sawchuk's heydey, the early and middle Fifties.
Bobby Hull dressed slowly and said little. What he did say had disbelief in it. "Never. Sawchuk never gave us that much trouble before."
A reporter said, "He simply pitched a no-hitter at you."
Hull, slipping a ring on one thick finger – "Yes."
The Toronto dressing room was cheerful, but not ecstatically so; there was some jubilance in the hangers-on, but the players seemed aware there is another game tomorrow. And that somewhere, in the Laurentian hills, the Montreal Canadiens are waiting.
Sawchuk sat in his socks and underwear a long time, head down, hands cupped around a can of Coke, absorbing what he had done.
Finally he looked up, wan, spent. "I feel 57, not 37."
"You played like you were 27," said Bill Stephenson, the sportscaster.
He puts much down to luck, and now he was saying, "Sometimes you get lucky. I move out to cut down the angle and the puck hits me. Lucky."
That sounds so simple, too easy an explanation for a prodigal performance in any professional. Luck, Budd Schulberg said, is only a bulb that shines when the current is on.
Sawchuk is not the exulting kind, but something he said before he went to shower suggested he knew he'd been a powerhouse. "I'd like to leave hockey like that," he said softly, "In good style."
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