The Penguins young duo of Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin combined to score four points in a 5-4 come from behind victory against the Rangers.

The Rangers lead 3-0 early in the second period after goals from Martin Straka, Chris Drury, and Sean Avery.  But midway through the game Pittsburgh answer back with four unanswered goals by Jarkko Ruutu, Pascal Dupuis, Marian Hossa, and Petr Sykora which gave them a 4-3 lead.

The Rangers answered back with a goal by Scott Gomez to tie the game at four.  Then with less than two minutes to go, Malkin scored to put the Penguins ahead for good.

“A game is never finished for us,” Sykora said. “We have the power to score to score a lot of goals here. It doesn’t matter if we’re down one, two, three goals.”

Early in the game the Rangers jumped out ahead behind strong goaltending by Henrik Lundqvist.  He kept the puck out of the net and allowed the Rangers to be creative offensively.  At least creative is the only way to describe the way Straka bounced a puck off Sergei Gonchar’s skates and into the net for the first goal.

The Rangers may have gotten lucky when Drury redirected a shot by Marc Staal into the net for a 2-0 lead.  Drury lifted his stick high enough for the refs to take another look at the play before determining it to be a goal.

After Avery scored on a two-on-one Henrik Lundqvist stopped making highlight reel saves.  Well at least the Pens learned they have to bounce pucks off people in order to get them past him.  Combine some lucky bounces and slow moving defensemen and you get a four goal streak.

Ruutu pulled an Avery like move at this point which apparently got in Michal Rozsival’s head enough to bank a shot from the left side off his skate to get the Penguins on the board.  Dupuis’ goal was the end result of Crosby showing off his skating ability mixed with slow moving defensemen mentioned earlier. 

The Pens tied the game early in the third period when Hossa banked a shot off another Ranger.  This time it was Gomez. 

Pittsburgh took its first lead of the game just 20 seconds later when Sykora scored from the right slot off a crisp pass from Malkin.  It was a fast moving play offensively for the Penguins and the Ranger defensemen didn’t move quick enough while the back-checkers proved ineffective.

From that point on the Rangers played with desperation, but perhaps not enough.  After Gomez made up for being the human backboard which tied the game in the first place the Rangers coughed up the lead one more time.  This time it was a powerplay goal by Malkin which gave the Pens a 5-4 lead.  To beat Lundqvist this time all Crosby had to do was take a very low percentage shot from the corner and bounce it off Malkin’s shin.

“I saw it was going wide and I reached for it and it hit Malkin’s leg and went in,” said Lundqvist.  “We just have to forget this. I don’t want to think about it, I just want to move on.”

“(Ahead) 3-0 in the playoffs, you’d like to think it’s over, but what are you going to do?” Gomez said. “We can’t get in a track meet with those guys. It’s over, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Game one goes to Pittsburgh.  Big game two this Sunday night.