Take out a span of just more than seven minutes spanning the end of the second period and the start of the third, and the Blackhawks played a strong game Sunday against the Lightning.
All seven-minute spans count, however, and the five goals the Lightning scored during that time — including three goals in 32 seconds in the third period to set a franchise record — rendered the Hawks’ otherwise-good effort irrelevant.
The result was a 6-3 Lightning victory that dealt the Hawks their 14th loss in their last 19 games.
‘‘That’s what they do,’’ Hawks interim coach Derek King said. ‘‘They strike, and they strike fast. It was just, ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ [It’s] tough for us to climb out of that. We don’t have that depth of firepower.’’
The Hawks easily could have led 3-0 instead of 1-0 after the first period, with Kirby Dach hitting the handle of Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy’s stick on an open net and Connor Murphy and Alex DeBrincat ringing consecutive shots off the post.
And the Hawks easily could have taken a 3-1 lead during a second-period power play in which Vasilevskiy twice robbed DeBrincat moving from post to post.
But the Hawks didn’t — Patrick Kane later called that squandered power play the turning point of the game — and the Lightning went to work, claiming a 3-2 lead before the second intermission and blowing the game open soon after the break.
‘‘It started snowballing,’’ defenseman Riley Stillman said. ‘‘We’ve got to do a better job of parking things once they’re over. Once one or two go in, you’ve got to find a way to regroup.’’
Kane, DeBrincat and Dylan Strome scored, but Vasilevskiy was the main reason the Hawks’ 9-7 advantage in high-danger scoring chances didn’t translate to the scoreboard.
‘‘He made some saves [where] I had my arms up in the air, pretty much, and all of a sudden this big leg appears or the glove hand comes up,’’ King said. ‘‘This game could’ve easily [gone] the other way. Obviously, it didn’t, but we’ll look at the video and probably realize we didn’t play as bad as we thought we did. We just gave them a little too much at certain times, and they took advantage of it.’’
Olympians honored
Six members of the U.S. women’s hockey team that won a silver medal at the Beijing Olympics last month were honored for International Women’s Day.
Oak Lawn native and Hawks development coach Kendall Coyne Schofield headlined the group, which also featured Abbey Murphy (Evergreen Park), Megan Bozek (Buffalo Grove), Jesse Compher (Northbrook), Savannah Harmon (Downers Grove) and Alex Cavallini (Delafield, Wisconsin).
‘‘Our team has so much to be proud of, regardless of the result,’’ Coyne Schofield said, referring to the 3-2 loss to Canada in the gold-medal game. “[Despite] . . . the adversity we faced, losing one of our best players [to injury] 10 minutes into the tournament, there wasn’t one person who said, ‘We can’t win this thing.’ ’’
