At the start of Game 3, as if to set the table for this night, Boston captain Brad Marchand leaned into Florida Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov at the opening face-off with some choice words.
“Wanna go?” he said.
He wanted to fight Barkov right then, right there. Surely he was setting some “tone” or making some “statement” he thought important. Maybe he wanted to pick up this night where Game 2 ended, which was with an undercard of fights topped by the Panthers’ Matthew Tkachuk flattening Boston’s David Pastrnak.