Penguins Short-Circuit Lightning, 5-1

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger. And you don’t mess around with Geno.

Readers of a certain age will recognize the lyrics to Jim Croce’s classic, You Don’t Mess Around With Jim. With all due respect to late singer/songwriter, I altered his last verse to sound a warning to the rest of the league.

Don’t rile the big Russian.

The two-time defending Cup champion Lightning learned the hard way. Five minutes into the third period of an intensely chippy affair, Evgeni Malkin banged into Corey Perry, who’d been throwing his weight around, and sent the Bolts’ heavy corkscrewing into the ice. Taking immediate exception, Perry’s linemate Pierre-Edouard Bellemare ran the Pens’ superstar into the boards. Geno bounced off the check and pursued Bellemare and the puck, hounding him into a turnover. Then Malkin burst up ice on a breakaway and torched countryman Andrei Vasilevskiy to make it 4-1 Pens.

“How do you like them apples?” crowed AT&T Sportsnet color man Bob Errey.

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