The Lightning are going to make this as hard as humanly possible for the Capitals

WASHINGTON — Thursday’s was one of the biggest games the Capitals had ever played, and they acted like it. D.C.’s hockey team was great on a night when it had a chance to kick the East’s top point-getting team into a 3-1 hole in the conference final.

The Capitals had the puck for the vast majority of the game. They compiled a 38-20 advantage in shots on goal, partially the product of having lots of power-play time, but only partly. (It was still 28-17 at five-on-five.) They got prime scoring chances all night, 33 of them to the Lightning’s 19. Alex Ovechkin was a magician, and the crowd at Capital One Arena was raucous from the opening faceoff. It was even louder for the game’s second faceoff, when the locals saw that Nicklas Backstrom was taking it after missing four games.

Everything was in Washington’s favor, except, it turned out, for one thing. That one thing was Tampa Bay goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, and he was enough to derail the whole night. The 23-year-old turned the Capitals’ big moment into a slog of a 4-2 loss.

The Capitals scored a couple of beauties in the first half of the game. Dmitry Orlov put a wicked slapper above Vasilevskiy’s right shoulder for the night’s first goal. Later, Evgeny Kuznetsov cashed in on a partial breakaway after Ovechkin blessed him with one of the most exquisite backhand saucer passes you will ever watch in your life.

But after that, Vasilevskiy was impeccable. He faced 18 more shots and stopped all of them, and a few came at an enormous degree of difficulty. He was precise in tracking pucks from behind his net and quickly transitioning to make difficult saves in front of him:

There was lot of heat in Vasilevskiy’s kitchen. The Capitals nine shots and seven scoring chances on power plays, where they went 0-for-4 despite a litany of chances. Ovechkin tested Vasilevskiy repeatedly from his favorite spot in the left faceoff circle, both with vicious one-timers and probing shot-passes to his countryman’s far post.

“Unbelievable,” the Lightning’s Victor Hedman, said. “Like I’ve been saying, you guys asked after two games, ‘How is he gonna respond?’ He’s proven [it] in these two games.”

The Capitals had their moments, and it looked at turns like they’d take over the game. But the Lightning had a lot of quick answers. After Orlov’s game-opening goal, Brayden Point tied it while the Caps’ PA announcer was still reading off the assists. The ominous “the other team just scored” organ started to play as soon as he was done. The Capitals pulled off a spirited penalty kill in the middle of the third period, but Alex Killorn scored the winning goal for Tampa Bay six seconds after Lars Eller left the penalty box.

“I think after that first one, like you said, the crowd was really buzzing,” Point said afterward, sitting next to Killorn at a makeshift podium on the Wizards’ basketball practice court around the corner from Tampa Bay’s dressing room. “To get a goal right away there, it definitely helped our momentum, for sure. It’s trying to stay even-keeled, I think — no matter if we score or if they score, trying to play the same way.”

They’ve been tied 2-2 after four games in all three of their series this spring, and they’re still here. In this series, they’ve played really well in three of the four games. They’re clearly comfortable playing on the road, and now they have, uh, road-ice advantage.

That’s the positive interpretation. The negative is that Vasilevskiy has heated up, and Capitals fans know too well how goaltenders can steal series. Vasilevskiy’s effort Thursday called out ghosts of Capitals playoffs past like Jaroslav Halak, Henrik Lundqvist, and Marc-Andre Fleury, who perversely might be waiting for them in two weeks if they beat Tampa.

That’s not really a Capitals thing, though. It’s a hockey thing. Goalies are wild cards.

It wouldn’t be right.

Most playoff series go at least six games, and it’s especially hard to have a waltz in the conference finals. The last time a series in this round didn’t go at least six games was 2013, when both the Eastern and Western series wrapped in four or five. The teams that survive this far don’t die easily, particularly not when they have goalies like Vasilevskiy.

So, there’s reason to be nervous. It’s not because these are the Capitals, though. It’s because the Lightning are good and winning playoff series against good teams is hard.

“I think it’d be more frustrating if it was the other way around: They outplayed us and we had no looks, and blah blah blah,” Capitals winger Tom Wilson said. “We’re confident in our game. We knew it wasn’t gonna be easy, and all those typical cliches. It’s 2-2, and if you’d have told us that before, we’d probably be pretty happy with that.”