Patrick Kane scores in second OT to keep Hawks’ season alive

ST. LOUIS — For a moment, you could see the Blackhawks’ path to victory, suddenly clear and no longer so improbable. You could see Artemi Panarin’s buzzer-beater at the end of the second period deflating the unflappable St. Louis Blues. You could see the otherworldly Brian Elliott crashing down to earth. You could see the Hawks going back to Chicago and winning at home, forcing a Game 7. You could see it all happening again — the Hawks, unkillable as ever; the Blues, a first-round flop again.

Well, these aren’t those Blues. But these are still those Hawks.

After blowing a two-goal, third-period lead, the Hawks escaped with a 4-3 victory Thursday night — well, Friday morning, technically — on Patrick Kane’s double-overtime winner, extending the season by at least two days. Game 6 will be Saturday night at the United Center.

Kane, who hadn’t scored in the series until he followed his own shot as the puck bounced through the crease, swooping around the back of the net and tucking it in behind Elliott, admitted afterward that the Hawks were feeling the pressure.

“It’s a new year, a new challenge,” Kane said. “This team we’re playing against is a very good hockey team, playing well. So I think there’s a little bit of pressure, a little bit of nervousness — which I think is good, too. It gets everyone excited.”

Kane was the hero, but it was Corey Crawford who kept the Hawks’ season alive, making 43 saves, including 11 in a harrowing first overtime.

“He was great,” Joel Quenneville said. “He was big and he was on top of it.”

And while the Blues just won two games in Chicago to push the Hawks to the brink, they spoke openly before the game about how important it was to put them away as soon as possible. The last thing you want to give a team as experienced as the Hawks is a second chance.

Still, the Blues, as they did after losing Game 2 at home, remained upbeat and confident.

“It’s going to be fun to win it in Chicago,” defenseman Alex Pietrangelo said. “That’s the game plan right now. Their backs are still up against the wall. … The Hockey Gods are testing us right now. We’ll get ready for Saturday.”

The Hawks used a three-goal second period, capped by Panarin’s goal with 0.4 seconds left, to take a 3-1 lead into the third. But the Blues went on the attack in the third, while the Hawks sat back, content to play out the final 20 minutes as one long penalty kill. Robby Fabbri’s sensational goal — working his way through traffic into the slot and snapping off a wrist shot to beat Crawford — cut the Hawks’ lead to 3-2 at 6:57. And David Backes’ lunging redirect of an Alex Pietrangelo shot tied it up at 14:50. Crawford and the Hawks had to stave off a too-many-men penalty in the waning minutes just to get the game to overtime.

In a startlingly uncharacteristic stat, the Hawks have had six leads in the series, and lost five of them. But Kane added to his own remarkable stat with his fifth career playoff overtime goal, rendering the third-period failure moot.

“Obviously, it feels good,” said Duncan Keith, who played 42 minutes while Quenneville went to a four-man defensive rotation in overtime. “I don’t know if that’s the way we drew it up. It would have been nice to just hang on to that lead. But Kaner came through. They probably carried a lot of the play there in the first overtime, but it just matters that we got the goal.”

After a surprisingly lackluster start — the Hawks had just two shots on goal through the first 19 minutes, and neither Kane nor Jonathan Toews had a single shot on goal until late in the second — the Hawks took over. Marian Hossa scored a shorthanded goal, keeping the puck on a 2-on-1 with Duncan Keith, at 11:32 to give the Hawks a 1-0 lead. It was the first goal by the star quartet of Hossa, Kane, Toews and Andrew Ladd all series.

The Blues, as they have all series, responded, though. Fifty-seven seconds later, on the same Artem Anisimov tripping penalty, Jaden Schwartz beat Crawford clean from the top of the left circle to tie the game at 1-1.

Then, suddenly, there were cracks in the wall that was Elliott. When a Panarin rebound landed on the goal line, Elliott reached back to save it as he did in Game 4. But Anisimov beat him to it, and the Hawks took a 2-1 lead at 15:24. Then, Kane found Panarin off a Toews faceoff win for the second-period buzzer-beater, a brutal backbreaker for the Blues that sucked the life out of the raucous crowd at Scottrade Center.

But the Blues, again, responded. And the Hawks, for once, imploded. But they survived all the same, and return home with a heartbeat, which is all they wanted.

“We’ve got a good group in here,” Keith said. “We’ve got guys that can put the puck in the net, and a goaltender that can make big saves. So we’ve always got a chance. We always have that confidence.”

Email: mlazerus@suntimes.com

Twitter: @marklazerus