After they have a bad game, they'll talk about not doing their job. We didn't do our job on the penalty kill tonight.

MORE: What to know about Rangers’ 5-1 win 

The not-so-big secret, though, is that they're not doing a job. Not a normal one, at least. They're expected to pull off some pretty crazy stuff, and a lot of time, respond in a way that a normal person wouldn't. There's no Sporting News coverage at a playoff game if the NHL writer has a family member die the day before.

Martin St. Louis' mother, France, passed away unexpectedly in Montreal on Thursday. France St. Louis was 63 years old. There her son was on Friday, after bouncing from New York to Quebec to Western Pennsylvania, doing his job. He didn't treat it like a normal situation because it wasn't one. His response blended two realties: that playing hockey provided some measure of normalcy, but it didn't fix everything, either.

"I'm not going to say that I forgot about my situation (on the ice)," St. Louis said. "She was with me the whole way."

The Rangers winger kept it together, faced with cameras and recorders from New York and Pittsburgh and Canada — but that wasn't without effort. There were a lot of well-placed pauses as he talked about "the best person I've ever known in my life" 28 hours or so before Mother's Day.



"I know deep down, my mom would want me to play this game. And she'd be proud of me coming here and helping as much as I can," St. Louis said.

"I owed it to her to do it. I know she would want me to do it."

After spending some time with his dad on Thursday, he did it. The two made the decision together, then passed that on to Rangers coach Alain Vigneault.

"At the end of the day, my message to him was there are more important things than hockey. You have to do what's right, you have to take care of your dad. They got up (Friday) morning and they talked and sorted it out and he's here," Vigneault said before the game.

Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist put it well: "It’s just a game, but at the same time we live this game, so it means so much to us, but today you play for Marty and his family. That’s the feeling I had going into this.”

During the game — a 5-1 Rangers win that forces the series back to Madison Square Garden for Game 6 on, you guessed it, Mother's Day and gives them a chance to pull even with Pittsburgh — St. Louis took 22 shifts and totaled 16:19 of ice time, taking two shots and attempting another. Through it, he had the support of Vigneault and the rest of his teammates.

"For the short amount of time I've been here, the quality of people that we have in here is unbelievable," St. Louis said, adding that he'd gotten support from across the league (Penguins captain Sidney Crosby included). "I didn't want to be a distraction. I just wanted to pull out a gutsy win, and the boys played tremendous."

Indeed they did — and St. Louis accomplished what he wanted, too. He was on the ice for Chris Kreider's tone-setting power-play goal, for example. New York had gone 36 attempts without one of those. They added another, courtesy of Ryan McDonagh, during a win that never was much in doubt.

We all need to be careful how much meaniing we ascribe to stuff like this; maybe having St. Louis around lifted the Rangers, and maybe it didn't. What's not debatable, though, is they pulled off a 180-degree turn from Game 4, when they managed 15 shots overall and looked, in a word, cooked. On Friday, they had 17 shots in the first period alone and made the Penguins look like anything but a team one win from a short series and a berth in the conference final.

"It doesn't surprise you in the game of hockey — that's kind of the way it's done in our culture," center Brad Richards said. "But it still means a lot to see him walk into this locker room and know that he stepped away for a few hours to battle for his teammates." 

"We wanted to put in a big effort and make it a memorable effort for him, because obviously, he'll never forget this game."

Game. Not job.