Sandstrom Settles a Quiet Score : Kings: He scores the winning goal, but downplays the fact it comes against the team he suffered a fractured forearm against this season.

It was Tomas Sandstrom’s worst nightmare.

Here he was, people all around him, surging in, reaching out and poking from all sides, the goal seemingly unreachable in the distance.

The Toronto side of the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens with Felix Potvin in goal?

No way.

Try the Kings’ side of the locker room area with his goal being the team bus.

Sandstrom can slap in a goal with little apparent emotion, as he did with 7:40 remaining in the third period Wednesday night to give the Kings a 3-2 victory over the Maple Leafs in Game 2 of the Campbell Conference final.

He only seems to sweat when he’s faced with a media mob, pushing and probing with cameras, tape recorders and notebooks.

Sandstrom loves to be a winner but hates the spotlight that goes with it. Absolutely hates it.

Sandstrom snuck out of the locker room after Wednesday’s game, only to be discovered by a reporter.

That enabled Rick Minch, the Kings’ director of public relations, to catch up.

“You have to go back in there,” said Minch, pointing to a locker room full of media.

“Why?” Sandstrom asked.

“Because you scored the game-winning goal,” Minch replied.

Sandstrom took a pass through the slot from Wayne Gretzky, took one step inside the left circle and smashed the puck over Potvin’s left shoulder.

The word on Potvin was that the best chance to score on him was up high.

“I tried to go upstairs on the goalie,” Sandstrom said. “It’s really hard to do. But I had to try. We needed that. I got lucky. I could have missed the net, too. I was lucky.”

That’s not the way Gretzky saw it.

“European players seem to shoot the puck on the fly and one-time shots very well,” he said, referring specifically to Sandstrom, a native of Finland who played for Sweden’s Olympic team. “I think his shot caught Potvin off guard.”

It seemed fitting that Sandstrom scored the winning goal against Toronto. He missed 23 games in the regular season because of a fractured forearm, the result of a slash by the Maple Leafs’ Doug Gilmour.

“My justice,” said King Coach Barry Melrose, “is that the hardest-working team wins.”

Sandstrom also shrugged off any idea of revenge.

“It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “You can’t walk around (angry) at a player. That’s what sportsmanship is all about.”

And what is Sandstrom all about? A lot more than appears on the surface, according to those close to him.

“He has a lot of emotion,” teammate Luc Robitaille said. “He just keeps it inside. He’s not a rah-rah guy, but he plays with a lot of emotion.”

His coach agrees.

“No one sees the real Tomas,” Melrose said. “He’s a funny man, but he plays in control.”

But underneath the surface, there has to be some frustration. At 28, now in his ninth season, the man who came to the Kings from the New York Rangers along with Tony Granato in the much-heralded 1990 trade for Bernie Nicholls is certainly more than ready to finally win a Stanley Cup.

“You just have to work harder,” he said.

And then he politely excused himself. The team bus never looked so good.