‘What I’ve been dreaming of’: Maple Leafs’ Hildeby keeps rolling with first shutout

TORONTO — It was supposed to be the five-alarm fire. The final nail in the coffin. The breaking point that plunged this Toronto Maple Leafs season into genuine catastrophe. An injury to netminder Joseph Woll plucked out of the lineup the man responsible for steadying a seemingly sinking ship. This after previous stabilizer Anthony Stolarz had already gone down weeks ago. A season that already seemed to be fraying looked set to come apart at the seams.

Then the soft-spoken, towering mountain of a netminder, Dennis Hildeby, took the ice, put the Maple Leafs on his back, and managed to stitch it all back together.

The 24-year-old showed well two nights ago in a tight affair with the Montreal Canadiens that ended in a shootout loss. But Monday night, under the Scotiabank Arena lights, Hildeby truly made his presence known, holding off everything the veteran Tampa Bay Lightning threw at him to claim the first shutout of his NHL career.

A crowning moment after a whirlwind week that’s seen him pushed into the spotlight, facing the most pressure he has yet as a big-leaguer, by a mile.

“I’m just trying to enjoy it,” the goaltender said after the final buzzer sounded on a 2-0 Maple Leafs win, a grin peeking through his scruffy beard. “It’s easier said than done. But at the end of the day, it’s what I’ve been dreaming of since I started playing hockey. 

“So, you’ve just got to remind yourself of that, and have a lot of fun in the meanwhile. And just compete.”

It was a night the entire Hildeby clan will remember fondly — though it’ll perhaps be most cherished by Hildeby’s father, Tomas, the official keeper of his son’s milestone memories.

“It feels good. It’s a puck — it’s something you look back to at the end of your career. My father will be very happy about that, because he collects them all,” Hildeby said. “But not only my dad — my mom, brother, and all the relatives out there, they’re watching every single game, keeping me updated, texting me. They’re having a lot of fun right now. It makes me very happy.”

The keepsake was well-earned. Winners of seven straight before dropping three in a row heading into Toronto, the seasoned Bolts came out Monday looking intent on returning to the win column, peppering the Maple Leafs’ cage early. They managed 15 shots in the opening frame alone, the club’s big dogs — Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point, and Jake Guentzel — all with fingerprints on the early effort.

But Hildeby held the fort. The Maple Leafs emerged unscathed. And in the final minutes of the first, Morgan Rielly pulled out a diving, backhanded tally that Tampa Bay was never able to answer.

“He’s very composed,” the goal-scorer said of Hildeby. “Works hard. He’s a routined guy. You learn that quickly — he comes in and he’s got a nice way about him, he’s very focused. He’s done a great job coming in, obviously.”

“He’s trusting his ability and his size, and staying pretty calm and cool in net, that’s what I see,” head coach Craig Berube added. “His puck play’s been good. But overall, his mindset is really good.”

A more focused mindset from the group in front of No. 35 played no small role in the eventual clean sheet. The Maple Leafs turned in one of the finer defensive efforts of their season against their Atlantic rival, largely keeping the Bolts’ high-flyers to the outside, and showing more bite than usual in what quickly became a chippy affair.

“It was a full team effort up and down the lineup as far as defending goes,” assessed veteran Jake McCabe, who led the back-end group with over 25 minutes of ice. “Just a bit more commitment to owning the middle of the ice, back pressure, our gaps — early on in the season it felt like we were giving away too many odd-man rushes, which put a lot of stress on us, put us behind the 8-ball a lot of nights. 

“We’ve been doing a much better job at that, and finding our game a little bit more.”

His pairing’s finest moment might’ve come within the first five minutes of the night, when a rare shaky sequence from Hildeby saw the puck bouncing and bobbling in the crease, threatening to trickle over the line and deliver the Lightning an early lead.

Instead, it was shuffled away by Troy Stecher, who’s been enjoying his own run as a late-arrival-turned-key-leader.

“That was obviously an important play. He’s been outstanding for us since he’s been here,” Rielly said of Stecher’s heroics. “That’s just another example of him coming in and having a big impact on the outcome of the game.”

No. 28 was all over the ice for the blue-and-white once again Monday night — pulling potential goals off the line, laying the body, filtering pucks through to the Lightning cage. The victory marked the fifth straight tilt in which Stecher’s earned over 23 minutes of ice from Berube, the 31-year-old journeyman quickly becoming a focal point of the coach’s injury-ravaged defence corps.

“He’s brought a lot of competitiveness to our team,” Berube said of the rearguard, who was claimed off waivers in mid-November. “And pace — he skates and moves out there. He doesn’t try to complicate the game. He’s a first-pass guy. But his pace and his competitiveness have really carried over to our whole team, in my opinion.”

There’s no doubt it did on this occasion. And the result was one of the most important wins these Maple Leafs have managed this season — a victory snagged not through run-and-gun offence or a three-on-three clincher, but through a simple, hard-fought defensive effort.

“That’s what you really need as a group, and that’s when we’re at our best in this room,” McCabe said of that effort. “Having that playoff mentality of tight games and really hard checking. That’s when we’re at our best. And, frankly, it creates a lot of offence for us too, when we’re checking like that.”

“There’s no easy game in this league,” John Tavares added. “But certainly the way they’ve been playing, the quality of team they’ve been for a long time, and again this season … I think it was an excellent win tonight. Something we can continue to build off of. 

“We’ve been working real hard at our game, and staying with it. … Guys have dug in real well, and things are building. We’ve just got to keep that going.”

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