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Flyers' Zepp the next minor miracle?

Rob Zepp, the 33-year-old rookie goalie, is entitled to dream after winning his first two NHL starts.

Flyers goalie Rob Zepp. (Yong Kim/Staff Photographer)
Flyers goalie Rob Zepp. (Yong Kim/Staff Photographer)Read more

FOR ONE NIGHT at least, Rob Zepp was the kid in net, facing an old guy with buckets and buckets of experience.

"Thirty-three is the new 23," he would joke afterward, but in a game in which the NHL's best-scoring team was pummeled by one of its lesser ones, it wasn't nearly the funniest anecdote of the night.

Zepp is, after all, only 33 and the guy on the other end of the ice, Evgeni Nabokov, the brick-wall netminder of San Jose's playoff runs for much of the last decade, is 39 years and 5 months old. Zepp was playing his second-ever NHL game after a lifetime of dreaming, and Nabokov was well past his 700th, and for every bit of the 22 minutes and 36 seconds he was out there, the "Russian Wall" was dropping bricks as if it was he who had come from Berlin, not Zepp.

One goal, a what-the-hey wide-angle backhander, climbed into the top of an inexplicably overexposed side of the net. Another slid ever so slowly off between his legs. Four goals on 13 shots and the old man was out of there, unable to provide the night off for Tampa's regular netminder, Ben Bishop.

Bishop didn't fare much better, allowing three goals on the first 10 shots he faced, but then again, neither did Zepp. The difference - and it was a big one on this upside-down night - is that by the time Zepp allowed a third goal on the 12th shot he faced, it was the third period and he was playing with a five-goal cushion.

That's right. The Flyers led the NHL's most proficient offense by five goals entering the third period en route to a 7-3 victory. And that makes Zepp not only undefeated in the two NHL games that constitute his NHL career, but a plus-5 in those games. Their secondary lines offensively challenged throughout this annoying season, the Flyers got goals from R.J. Umberger, Michael Raffl, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare and lest we forget, Chris VandeVelde.

Can you say, "Flying Pigs"?

Now it's only two games and yeah, it's a whole lot of voodoo, but given all the other things the Flyers have vainly tried this season, playing their feel-good card in as many games as is realistic over the 2 weeks Steve Mason is to be out might be the way I would go - for kind of the same reasoning that Zepp gave a reporter when asked if he feared one bad outing would doom his long-nurtured NHL dream before it had a chance to get legs.

"It's always in the back of your mind [that] if you don't play well there might not be another opportunity," he said. "But at this point, I have nothing to lose. So I wasn't going to dwell on that. It took a long time to get here. I wasn't going to focus on all the negative things that might come out of it. I was just going to do what I could do."

It would be a better story, of course, if Zepp was lending relief to a better, Cup-hopeful team, the way 27-year-old Chico Resch did for those Islanders teams that scared the bejesus out of the Flyers 4 decades ago, or the way 31-year-old Tim Thomas finally emerged from the minors to become a two-time Vezina winner and a Conn Smythe recipient during the Bruins' 2011 Stanley Cup run.

"Without Timmy coming over the way he did," Zepp said, "I don't know if it would be possible for me."

It would be a better story, of course, if Zepp's personal odyssey even hinted at such magic for this team. But the end of last night's game only served as a reminder of why it doesn't, the Flyers dominating the Eastern Conference's best team for two periods before resuming their skittish ways in an unnerving third period in which Zepp faced more shots than he had in the first two.

He stopped all but that one, diving across his crease at one point after a particularly comical game of hot potato between the more seasoned professionals in front of him, snapping away Matt Carle's slapper with 4.7 seconds left to punctuate his second victory in as many starts.

And sending the fandom home smiling, a fandom that included his wife and her sister, who had taken a train from their Lansdale home to see the game.

It's just almost equidistant, that home, to Allentown and to Philadelphia, a reflection of both Zepp's dream and of his reality. He will play here, he knows, for as long as Mason does not. But with the schedule packed with games over the next 2 weeks, including five at home, there should be plenty of opportunity to feed that dream of his.

"When I got the call to come up this time, it was a different feeling, a different level of preparedness," he said. "Just the overwhelming emotion of the first time of working so long toward that opportunity . . . No matter what I did, it was tough to suppress those feelings . . .

"This time I felt very comfortable right from the start of the game."

On Twitter: @samdonnellon

Columns: ph.ly/Donnellon