Dave Hyde: Florida Panthers are up 2-0 on Toronto and suddenly the talk of hockey

The Florida Panthers won Game 2 and lost a word.

They beat the Toronto Maple Leafs again Thursday night, 3-2, to win both opening games in Toronto. They won the three games before that against Boston. They’ve now won five straight playoff games in nine nights against NHL heavyweights.

So here’s what they’ve lost: The “upset” verb. That’s no longer attached to their wins. They’ve outplayed it by now.  They’ve showed by now, again and again, these wins aren’t coming by magic or sprinkled pixie dust or in some manner that should shock the hockey world anymore.

“We’re a good team,” coach Paul Maurice said, just as he has for a while now.

Do you see that by now? Doesn’t everyone?

Oh, you can be surprised, as well as stunned and stupefied, in the context this franchise doing so microscopically little since 1996. The Game 7 win in Boston was their first Game 7 win since 1996. Game 1 win in Toronto was their first win in a second round since 1996. And so on.

You also could be understandably shocked the Panthers rebounded from down three games to one to beat a historically strong Boston team. How could you not? But we’re past that idea by now. They keep showing that Boston series was no fluke and these two games in Toronto involved no upset.

Did you see how the Panthers responded to Toronto scoring two goals in the opening five minutes in Game 2? It’s how they been responding for a couple of months now. They didn’t panic. They didn’t exhale and move on to Game 3 comforted by knowing they’d already won a game in Toronto.

They got the kind of play that turned the night, a nifty pass from Sam Reinhart to set up Anton Lundell’s goal that made it 2-1. They then opened the second period with some lightning as Aleksander Barkov and Gustav Forsling scored in the first 68 seconds.

That was it for the scoring. No goals. No wild offense. And that meant the night settled on goalie Sergei Bobrovsky to be the star of the game. He was up to that. After those opening minutes, he closed the night on Toronto.

Some highlights: a lunging elbow-first save of Toronto star Auston Matthews in a second-period power play; a stop of William Nylander, who walked in alone in the third period; a kick save of another Toronto star, John Tavares; and another stop of Nylander, who skated in alone on him again with less than 10 minutes left.

And then a Nylander shot went off the crossbar.

Sure, puck luck helps.

“I think you need your goaltender to win you a game every series,” Maurice said.

The Panthers now get something else they need once a series: A two-day break. They haven’t had that since midway through the Boston series. It’s been three emotional elimination games against Boston followed by two opening games in Toronto.

“We had two days off after the Game 4 of the Boston series and we needed it,” Maurice said. “The first four games in that boston series were twice as physical as we have played here …  What we had to expend to get to tonight, we need that rest.”

This was another night where the Panthers were the better team. Not for the first five minutes. But for the next 55. Again, this wasn’t the script of an upset. Five straight playoff wins say something more is at work here.

“It’s a good start for us,” Barkov said. “We have to go home and work even harder.”

No one’s counting this series done. The NHL landscape shows teams are winning on the road at a historic clip. So the series doesn’t start until a road team loses. But the math can’t be lost on Toronto: It needs to win four of the next five games to take the series.

After each win, too, the same questions come to the Panthers. How much fun is this? How resilient is this team? How does this keep going?t

No one in the league is more impactful than Matthew Tkachuk these playoffs. His linemate, Sam Bennett, knocked Toronto’s Matthew Knies out of the game with a hit. And tough? Defenseman Josh Mahura took a puck to the face and went off the ice dripping blood. He missed a couple shifts.

“This is a special team,’’ Barkov said.

How special remains to be seen. But the pregame locker room as shown on TNT told a story. Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe stood before a whiteboard of the Panthers lines and defense pairings. He talked of playing “relentlessly” and, “We just don’t go away.” Normal stuff.

In the Panthers pre-game locker room, Nick Cousins walked around acting like some mock coach. He spoke in some incomprehensible hoo-ha dialect, pointing at players, reading from some paper in his hand, as the players clapped at the comedy of it all.

Maybe they’re looser that way. Surely they’re riding whatever is working by now. They keep winning. They keep advancing. They swept the first two games in Toronto, just like they won the final three games of the Boston series.

That’s five straight playoff wins in nine exhausting days. That’s not the stuff of upsets. It’s time to believe Maurice when he says, “We’re good.”

Just how good remains to be seen.