Pizza, Red Bull, and the 6th-longest NHL game ever

Nobody expected Game 1 of the 2023 Eastern Conference Final to end before midnight. Puck drop at PNC Arena in Raleigh was 8:00 PM Eastern on May 18. By 1:55 AM on May 19, after four overtime periods and 139 minutes and 47 seconds of actual hockey, the Florida Panthers finally beat the Carolina Hurricanes 3–2 — and Matthew Tkachuk scored the winner with 12.7 seconds left in the fourth overtime. 1

Twelve-point-seven seconds. That is the margin by which two professional hockey teams avoided playing a fifth overtime that would have pushed them past 2 AM.

Between the final horn and that near-miss, here is what happened in the locker room: players cracked open Red Bulls. Someone ordered pizza. The whole place, according to Tkachuk, smelled like a pizzeria.

The 2023 Eastern Conference Final matched two of the NHL's better-built rosters. The Carolina Hurricanes (52–21–9 on the regular season) were the hosts, a team famous for defensive structure and goaltender Frederik Andersen — who entered Game 1 with a 5–0 record in the 2023 playoffs. 2 The Florida Panthers had not reached an Eastern Conference Final since 1996 — before a large share of their current roster was born — but they had swept their previous two series and arrived in Raleigh having won every road playoff game they played. 1

Through 60 minutes, regulation was itself a reasonable hockey game. Seth Jarvis opened the scoring for Carolina at 19:48 of the first period on the power play. Aleksander Barkov tied it for Florida at 15:28 of the second, and Carter Verhaeghe put the Panthers ahead at 17:43. Stefan Noesen tied it again for the Hurricanes 3:47 into the third. Four goals, two lead changes, regulation ending 2–2. 2 A clean, close playoff game by any normal measure.

Then overtime began, and the game refused to end.

Two minutes and 35 seconds into the first overtime, Ryan Lomberg — returning from an eight-game upper-body injury absence — stripped Jalen Chatfield of the puck in the slot, spun, and scored what appeared to be the game-winner. The Florida bench erupted. The crowd groaned. 1

Then Carolina challenged for goaltender interference. Video review showed Panthers forward Colin White making skate-to-skate contact with Andersen, then bumping him — Andersen ended up on all fours on the opposite side of his crease — before Lomberg's shot went in. 3 The goal was disallowed. The game continued.

Ten minutes later, at 12:31 of the same overtime period, Jarvis ripped a shot on the power play that hit the crossbar. Still 2–2. 1

By the time the first overtime ended without a goal, Carolina had hit the post once and had a goal erased by replay. Florida had survived both. The game was no longer a tight playoff contest — it was becoming something else.

The story of the next three overtime periods belongs mostly to two men standing between the pipes.

Sergei Bobrovsky (Florida Panthers goaltender, known throughout the league as a playoff question mark before this run) made 63 saves on 65 shots across the full game, posting a .969 save percentage. That is a Florida Panthers franchise record for saves in a single game. 2 He faced 34 shots across the four overtime periods alone. In the fourth overtime, with the game threatening to become a historical footnote for the wrong team, he stopped Seth Jarvis off the rush at 14:54. He made a right-pad save on Sebastian Aho's rebound attempt with 1:11 remaining in that same period. 1

On the other end, Frederik Andersen made 57 saves on 60 shots (.950 save percentage) — for a team that lost the game. 2

Combine them: 120 saves in a single playoff game.

Bobrovsky, asked afterward to describe what playing nearly 140 minutes feels like, did not reach for poetry.

Carolina head coach Rod Brind'Amour, who had watched his goalie make 57 saves and still lose, offered a simpler assessment: "It was a good goalie battle. It was unfortunate we just couldn't find one." 3

At some point after the second overtime, an unknown person with access to a phone and a credit card ordered pizza for the Florida Panthers locker room.

This is not rumor. Tkachuk confirmed it. "Guys cracking Red Bulls before the fourth overtime," he said afterward. "There was pizza flowing. It was actually pretty funny seeing it." 1

Meanwhile, on the Florida blue line, defenseman Brandon Montour — who logged 57 minutes and 56 seconds of ice time that night, against a season average of 24:08 — was presumably declining the pizza. On the Carolina side, 38-year-old Brent Burns played 54 minutes and 43 seconds, more than twice his season average of 23:13. Seven skaters across both teams exceeded 50 minutes of ice time. 2

When asked whether he would rest Burns in Game 2, Brind'Amour seemed genuinely amused. "Maybe I shouldn't go to him," he said. "But I can tell you right now that if I confronted him, he would punch me in the face." 4

By the fourth overtime, even the Panthers had lost track of what they were playing. Ryan Lomberg — the same forward whose goal had been disallowed back in the first overtime — put it cleanly: "We didn't even know what overtime we were in." 3

The end, when it arrived, was unglamorous.

With 12.7 seconds remaining in the fourth overtime, Carolina defenseman Jaccob Slavin attempted to clear the puck from his own zone. The clearing attempt struck a referee. Sam Bennett collected the loose puck along the boards and passed to Tkachuk in the right face-off circle. Tkachuk fired a wrist shot past Andersen. 1

Game over. Panthers 3, Hurricanes 2. Tkachuk immediately sprinted toward center ice, arms raised, as if he needed to physically run away from the possibility of another period.

It was his third overtime goal of those 2023 playoffs. "Probably my favorite so far in my life," he said. "Big to not let it go to five overtimes there." 1

Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal, asked to explain the series of events that lost his team the game, did not blame the referee who deflected Slavin's clear. He just accepted the logic of a six-hour hockey game: "It was kind of really who was going to make the last mistake. Unfortunately, it was us." 3

The game's 79 minutes and 47 seconds of overtime made it the 6th-longest game in Stanley Cup playoff history. 4 For context, the longest game ever played in the NHL went 116 minutes and 30 seconds — Detroit vs. the Montreal Maroons in 1936, a six-overtime contest. 4 The second-longest was Toronto vs. Boston in 1933 at 104 minutes and 46 seconds. 4 The Panthers and Hurricanes came nowhere near either of those, but they earned their footnote.

Florida went on to sweep Carolina 4–0 in the series, with Tkachuk scoring three of his four series goals as game-winners and Bobrovsky posting a .966 save percentage across all four games. 5 They lost the Stanley Cup Final 4–1 to the Vegas Golden Knights — Bobrovsky was reportedly pulled midway through Game 2 after allowing four goals on 13 shots — and the team that had looked unstoppable since midnight on May 19 ran out of gas against the Western champion.

One year later, Bobrovsky came back. He led the Panthers to the 2024 Stanley Cup, defeating the Edmonton Oilers in seven games. The man who had stood in his crease for 139 minutes and 47 seconds and called it "a game of attrition" finally got his ring.

The mirror: The 4OT game settled nothing strategically — Carolina was eliminated two games later, and Florida did not win the Cup that year. What it proved is the more mundane kind of truth: at some point in a long enough hockey game, the scoreboard stops mattering and what you have left is stamina, goaltending, and whoever ordered the pizza. The Panthers had all three.