Cousins Strikes With 2:18 Left as Senators Rally Past Mammoth 4-2

Nick Cousins had spent most of the night missing chances he would normally bury. Then, with two minutes and eighteen seconds left in a tied game, he went to the one place where missed chances stop mattering: straight to the front of the net.

Ottawa won an offensive-zone faceoff. Shane Pinto pulled the puck back to Thomas Chabot at the point. Chabot fired low, and Cousins, parked at the far post, got his stick on it and redirected it past Karel Vejmelka. The Canadian Tire Centre erupted, the Senators led 3-2, and sixteen seconds from the end Pinto added an empty-net goal to make it 4-2.

"It was probably not our best," Cousins admitted afterwards, "but you know, certainly found a way." He had a point. The Senators were outshot 12-5 at five-on-five in the first period and 32-21 on the night, and for long stretches Utah looked like the sharper, faster team. But Ottawa found a way, which is a skill in itself, and head coach Travis Green thought the win said more about his team than a comfortable one would have. In ways, he said, it was their best of the season — not because of how well they played, but because of how they refused to lose.

The game had swung back and forth all evening. Fabian Zetterlund gave Ottawa the lead on the power play, and after Utah levelled it, Michael Amadio restored the advantage at 6:29 of the third on a neat give-and-go, taking a pass down low from Claude Giroux and feeding it straight back for Amadio to score into the open net. Three minutes later the lead was gone again, Barrett Hayton tipping Clayton Keller's shot from just inside the blue line to make it 2-2, and the building went quiet.

That is when the Senators' depth, so often questioned this season, finally showed up. Cousins played a season-high 14:42, trusted by Green in the biggest moments of the game, and he repaid that trust with the goal that decided it — his second of the season, and his first game-winner since last November, against, of all teams, the Utah Mammoth.

Behind it all was Samuel Ersson, who made 30 saves for his third consecutive victory while filling in for the injured Linus Ullmark. Ersson has quietly become one of the stories of Ottawa's season, a goaltender who arrived as insurance and is playing like a plan. Vejmelka stopped 17 at the other end, and will feel he deserved better from a night when his team outplayed the opposition for long stretches and left with nothing.

The numbers around the win are kind to Ottawa. The Senators are 11-6-1, have won two straight for the first time since October 12, and have taken points in four of their last five. It was also their second game in a row decided by a go-ahead goal in the final five minutes — Amadio did it on Tuesday, Cousins did it on Saturday — only the seventh time in franchise history that has happened, and the first since February 2007. And it came in their first home game after a five-game road trip on which they went 2-2-1, the kind of return that can either lift a team or expose it. This one lifted them.

Utah, meanwhile, finished a five-game trip of its own at 2-2-1 and heads to Vegas on Wednesday. The Mammoth are 10-7-1, a good team having a good season, and they will not panic over this. But they will remember the name on the scoresheet.