STANELY CUP FINALS : It’s a Sore Spot That Will Stick With McSorley : Game 5: His penalty in Game 2 may have been a turning point, but he says he will ‘try to be a better player for it.’

Marty McSorley’s soft voice always seems incongruous with his bruising brand of hockey.

After the Stanley Cup was lost Wednesday night, his words were even softer, his blue eyes more blank.

They flared to life only in moments of resistance and frustration on two topics--his stick and his future.

Until Montreal Coach Jacques Demers’ bold challenge of McSorley’s stick in Game 2, the Kings had a bead on the Stanley Cup championship.

They were the length of a minor penalty away from going ahead, 2-0, on the road.

Three Montreal overtime victories and a dominating Game 5 later, the Canadiens have their 24th Cup and the Kings can only look back.

And looking back, they can still see referee Kerry Fraser measuring the curvature of McSorley’s stick with the Kings clinging to a 2-1 lead with 1:45 to play in the third period of Game 2.

“I realize what happened. I’m not going to kid anybody. I’m nobody’s fool,” McSorley said about the third time the question was asked in the Kings’ somber dressing room. “I know what happened. I didn’t help our hockey team. What can I say, I know what I did.”

McSorley took a penalty for an illegal stick, Eric Desjardins scored the tying goal on the power play and then the game-winner in overtime.

And the Kings never led for another moment of the series.

It is hard to lay the fate of a series on an extra quarter-inch curve of a stick. But it is hard to go back to any other point.

Will the memory of Game 2 linger?

“I’m not fearful of anything. I’m responsible for what I do,” McSorley said. “I’m going to take everything in stride and try to be a better player for it. That’s all I can do.”

But was it the turning point?

“I think you’ve got to look at every overtime,” he said. “Right up to Game 4, if we had gone out and put the puck in the net it would have been 2-2. It we won Game 3 we would have been up, 2-1. We were right there all three times. If we won one, it would have been 2-2 and after tonight we would have been going back to L.A.”

The questions that weren’t about the past were about the future. McSorley will become a free agent this summer, and the game he had just played could have been his last as a King.

“I’m not even considering that right now,” McSorley said. “I look around the hockey team and I’m very proud to be an L.A. King right now.”

Looking around, he knew that the team he saw is a piece of history now.

“I don’t know if you ever forget the opportunity that we just had,” he said. “We had a chance to win the Stanley Cup. You can’t let that get away. The team will never be the same again. There are always changes, always a 30% or 40% turnover.”

McSorley was at the center of the Kings’ success in the playoffs, and close to its failure too. He had 10 points in the postseason, including the Kings’ only goal in the 4-1 series-clinching loss.

But he also was responsible for Stickgate, and a 10-minute misconduct penalty in Game 4.

And even before Game 5, Canadien center Guy Carbonneau was quoted by the French press saying that McSorley was still using an illegally curved stick.

“Let them go out and call it then,” McSorley said. “They can say what they want.”

By Game 5, it seemed as though the Cup, in its 100th year, was meant to go to the team that had won it most.

The Kings were millimeters of metal away from a shutout. McSorley’s slap shot hit both posts before clanging in.

“I’m sitting on the bench and I thought, if that really wasn’t a goal, what do we have to do?” McSorley said.

All he knows now is that that whatever it was, it wasn’t done.

“I know we were good enough to win the Stanley Cup,” he said. “I still feel we were good enough.

“It’s still not over in my mind or in my heart right now.”