Blackhawks score five straight to rally past Blues, force Game 7

There was no music.

The red light signaling a television timeout flashed, the ice crew skated out with their shovels, the teams huddled at the benches, and for the first time all season, there was no music.

There was no need. The United Center provided its own stirring soundtrack — a standing ovation that swelled into a deafening, sustained roar for three full minutes at the 12:31 mark of the second period Saturday night, the cacophony continuing even as Andrew Shaw and David Backes squared off at the faceoff dot to resume play.

“It was unbelievable,” Shaw said. “It was probably the loudest I’ve ever heard the United Center. My ears were buzzing.”

The crowd had come to life, because the Blackhawks — as they have so many times when left for dead over the past several seasons — had done the same.

The Hawks scored five straight goals after giving up three straight goals, with the forgotten Dale Weise scoring the game-winner late in the second period, to take a 6-3 victory Saturday night in Game 6 of their first-round series with the St. Louis Blues.

They’re now 15-1 in Game 6s under Joel Quenneville, and 13-4 in elimination games, having twice extended their season in the last three nights. Game 7 is Monday night in St. Louis. The Hawks are 2-2 in Game 7s in the Quenneville era.

It’ll be the ultimate test of character for the Blues, who have been so good and so confident all series, insisting that their three straight first-round flops were distant memories. Well, they’ll spend the next two days being reminded of them.

“It’s two great teams going at it,” Blues coach Ken Hitchcock said. “There’s a reason they’ve won a lot of hockey games and championships. They raised their level a little bit in the second period. They were desperate, we didn’t match it. … Now it’s our turn to answer. We’ve worked hard all year to get to this and we’ve got an opportunity in front of us. I really want to see us take advantage of it, but we’re going to need people to play better. We need our whole team to play better. If we do that, then I like our chances.”

An hour before the bedlam, the arena was silent. Funereal, even. A stunning turn of events had pushed the Hawks to the brink of the brink — down 3-1 in an elimination game. After Andrew Ladd scored just 3:47 into the game, Weise found Andrew Desjardins, who was staring at a wide-open net. But the choppy United Center ice did him no favors, and he chipped the skittering puck wide. Thirteen seconds later, Scottie Upshall took a Steve Ott pass and beat Corey Crawford to tie the game, and what should have been a 2-0 Hawks lead suddenly was a 1-1 tie.

Less than three minutes later, Alex Pietrangelo — who boldly declared after losing in double-overtime in Game 5 that “It’s going to be fun to win it in Chicago” — scored through traffic from the point. Two minutes and nine seconds after that, Vladimir Tarasenko ripped a shot past Crawford to make it 3-1. Three goals in 4:42, on five shots.

The fans despaired. The Hawks did not.

“It’s probably a lot calmer in here than most rooms,” Andrew Ladd said. “We’ve got a lot of guys that have been around a while, and played in a lot of big games, and understand momentum shifts, and the fact that there still was 40 minutes left to be played. There’s a lot of confidence in here in what we can do.”

Sure enough, Joel Quenneville juggled the lines, moving Richard Panik to the first and Shaw to the fourth, and the Hawks took over the game. Artem Anisimov batted a puck out of mid-air for a power-play goal at 4:14, and the Hawks started attacking Blues goalie Brian Elliott from all angles. Panik got a great chance. Marian Hossa was denied on the doorstep. Shaw and Weise charged in on a 2-on-1.

Finally, Trevor van Riemsdyk evened the score at 3-3 — and sent the arena into delirium — when Panik, who had his best game of the season, held up on a rush and fed Jonathan Toews, who found van Riemsdyk out-hustling Troy Brouwer to the net.

At that point, the go-ahead goal by Weise — perhaps this spring’s Antoine Vermette, suddenly a playoff hero after being a healthy scratch for three of the first four games — four minutes later seemed like a foregone conclusion. By then, the Hawks had outshot the Blues 19-4 in the second period. They’ve outscored St. Louis 10-3 in the second period in this series.

“They had a big surge,” Hitchcock said. “We didn’t answer it.”

The Blues settled down in the third period and made a push, with Crawford’s stop on Jori Lehtera in the slot at 12:30 looming large. But Panik drew a hooking penalty on Jay Bouwmeester with a strong rush to the net, and Shaw’s power-play goal off a Patrick Kane feed from behind the net at 16:53 sealed the victory, and assured the Hawks — half-dead and buried two periods earlier — at least one more game.

“This is a special group,” Weise said. “The confidence, you can feel throughout the room. [You] get down 3-1 and a lot of teams are going to panic. Not this team.”

Email: mlazerus@suntimes.com

Twitter: @marklazerus