Brenden Morrow scored a power play goal 9:03 into the fourth overtime as host Dallas eliminated pesky San Jose in the eighth longest game in NHL history.
The Stars are going to the conference finals for the first time since 2000, when they returned to the Stanley Cup finals the year after winning the franchise's only championship. They will face Detroit, which wrapped up its second-round sweep of Colorado Thursday night.
After winning the first three games in the series, the Stars finally knocked out the Sharks on the third try and avoided having to go to San Jose for a deciding game. The win came after having two apparent goals disallowed following video reviews in Game 5, and Evgeni Nabokov's sensational glove save early in the first overtime of Game 6 - well before midnight.
Penguins 3, Rangers 2 - So much for the talk a team as young as the Pittsburgh Penguins couldn't advance this far in the playoffs. So much for the speculation Marian Hossa couldn't score big postseason goals.
So much for the New York Rangers, too, whose decided edge in experience meant nothing in a five-game series in which the Penguins' superior talent repeatedly made the difference.
Hossa scored his second goal of the game 7:10 into overtime and the Penguins rallied after giving up a two-goal lead to beat the Rangers, 3-2, yesterday in Pittsburgh and advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in seven years.
Sidney Crosby began a rush into the Penguins end with a pass to Pascal Dupuis, who attempted to give it back to Crosby. The puck trickled away but ended up on Hossa's stick, and he beat Henrik Lundqvist from the slot for his fifth of the playoffs to end New York's season. The Penguins won the second-round series, 4-1.
The Penguins, the conference's worst team two years ago, will meet the Philadelphia Flyers, the conference's worst team last season, in the first all-Pennsylvania conference final. The teams haven't met in the postseason since the Flyers' six-game victory in a 2000 second-round series best remembered for Philadelphia's five-overtime win in Game 4.
The Rangers scored twice in less than 90 seconds to tie it early in the third. Lauri Korpikoski, playing his first NHL game, scored 2:03 into the period with the second Rangers shot in nearly 17 minutes. The Rangers tied it 1:22 later as Nigel Dawes scored on a backhander off Scott Gomez's setup while cutting across the slot.
Hossa and Evgeni Malkin gave Pittsburgh its 2-0 lead by scoring about four minutes apart during a second period in which Pittsburgh had four power plays.
