Wild recalls better days, ends streak

This is a team that lost to Columbus twice in five days recently. This is a team that, frankly, looked like it gave up on the season 24 hours earlier in St. Louis.

Yet in a Sunday matinee, on NBC, in the featured game of Hockey Day in America, the Wild stunningly stopped a seven-game winless streak by shutting out the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins 2-0.

Go figure.

It took a career-high 48 saves from Niklas Backstrom to get it done, but as coach Mike Yeo said, "It was sort of reminiscent of how we were winning games back when we were winning a lot of games ... if you remember that time."

You may need to burst a few million brain cells to remember that time, but Yeo is right.

It took extraordinary goaltending, timely goals, a commitment to team defense, hard work and, well, guts, like when Darroll Powe got in 6-9 behemoth Zdeno Chara's face during one scrum, and Devin Setoguchi dropped in front of Chara's ginormous slapshot at another juncture.

This is why Yeo walked into his postgame news conference and said, "Am I allowed to smile?"

"That's why you work every day to win games. You know, winning, that's fun," said Backstrom, who halted a personal five-game winless streak and made the most saves ever in a Wild shutout. "That's why you play. We haven't had a lot of wins the last couple months, so it's been tough. I hope this is a good start for something new."

Eden Prairie's Chad Rau, whose travel adventure to get to Minnesota took him from Abbotsford, British Columbia, to Vancouver Airport to Los Angeles Airport to a Minneapolis red-eye that landed after 6 a.m. Sunday, scored his second career goal, which became his second career winning goal.

He also scored in his NHL debut on Hockey Day Minnesota on Jan. 21.

With the game scoreless midway through the second period, Dany Heatley made a terrific play in the neutral zone to get the puck to Rau, who was cutting through with speed. He flew into the offensive zone and stared at Marco Scandella for what seemed like an eternity.

"I was looking to pass. That was my plan," Rau said.

Rau's tally was the first Wild goal by a forward not named Heatley, Setoguchi or the injured Mikko Koivu since Kyle Brodziak scored Feb. 4 at Dallas. That was seven games ago.

"There were some pretty big smiles on the bench when [Rau] came back there," Brodziak said.

Also, in as big of a feel-good moment five minutes later, Moorhead's Matt Cullen ended a 15-game goal drought with his first goal since Jan. 10. It was Cullen's first point in nine games and his first power-play goal since Nov. 15.

"Big relief," said Cullen, whose lack of production the past month has weighed on him.

It was a nice response from the Wild after what Cullen called a "demoralizing" loss the day before. But it was one victory.