The game-tying goal, which would have been his first of the Stanley Cup Final, appeared to be a foregone conclusion.
Presented with not one but two glorious chances to score in the dying moments of Game 4, Steven Stamkos failed to convert on both.
On the first, he fired the puck toward a seemingly wide open net, only to see it deflected wide off the stick of Brent Seabrook. On the second, he was denied point blank by Corey Crawford.
In the end, his Tampa Bay Lightning dropped the contest by a score of 2-1, allowing the Chicago Blackhawks to even the series at two games apiece.
Faced now with a best-of-three affair, Stamkos - one of the game's most prolific scorers - remains confident the puck will go in sooner than later.
"Nope, (I'm) not frustrated," Stamkos said Thursday. "I mean, it's going to go (in if) I just stick with it. If I had those two chances over again I'd try to get it away as quick as I could. The first one, their D got a stick on it. Not much I can do. The looks are coming. Our game is right there. They're eventually going to start going in, hopefully in bunches."
All told, Stamkos has seven goals in 24 playoff games, all of which he scored in the middle two rounds after being flummoxed in seven games against the Detroit Red Wings, and now, so far, the Blackhawks.
Stamkos scored at a success rate of 16 percent in the regular season, and has a career average of 17.2. He's sitting on 11.1 percent in the postseason, while firing 2.62 shots on goal per game.
For his part, Stamkos chalks up his lack of scoring to "bad, bad bounces" and "puck luck," but with a big performance on home ice in Game 5, all will be forgotten.
By his own acknowledgement, however, he'll certainly have to keep working for it.
"No one said this was going to be easy," Stamkos said. "It's not easy to win the Stanley Cup."
