Ducks Head Home on Red Alert After 5-1 Drubbing

If you closed your eyes for just a moment, you could have heard it. The thundering hooves. The screaming and panic. The running of the bulls, that’s what it was.

Joe Louis Arena played the part of Pamplona in Spain. The Detroit Red Wings were the bulls of course, snorting, snarling, drooling bulls. Bulls with an attitude. Bulls with heads down and horns pointed. Bulls with a purpose. Which left for the Anaheim Mighty Ducks the role of the beleaguered, clueless runners. The goofy guys in tennis shoes and T-shirts leaping over walls and ducking into doorways and desperately trying not to be gored. Not to be bloodied or bruised. Not to be hurt.

There are ways to lose with honor. That was what the Ducks did Wednesday night against the Red Wings. Then there are other ways. The way, for example, the Ducks lost Friday night. The final score was 5-1 in favor of Detroit. It was 4-0 at the end of the first period, which was all the game anyone needed to see.

It seemed as if the Ducks were constantly skating a man short. Wherever the puck was, that was where a Duck wasn’t. Whenever you heard a hard thud, a burst of air escaping from somebody’s gut, that was the Duck, getting hit, falling down, crumpling like so much wadded-up paper. Chris Chelios was swatting away Paul Kariya as if Kariya were a summer mosquito.

“This was awful,” Teemu Selanne said. Selanne was one of the few Ducks willing to be questioned about this total demolition. And, really, what more could be said?

Selanne said, over and over, that this first period, when the Ducks were being plastered to the boards, flattened to the ice, made totally irrelevant to any of the rest of the proceedings, needed to be a learning experience. Selanne said “we have 36 hours to learn a lesson,” but what lesson to be learned? That was tougher to figure out.

“It’s our turn to show some character,” Selanne said. And maybe it is. Maybe the Ducks will come out Sunday at noon and score a goal in the first minute, just like the Red Wings did Friday night. Maybe the Ducks will find something inside them, some place deep down where they will decide that it’s time to quit thinking about winning the series and instead maybe win a faceoff or hit somebody first.

For the way the Ducks played Friday, it brought to mind all the California stereotypes--cheese-eating, wine-sipping softies. Of how the Ducks not only couldn’t beat the Red Wings, they couldn’t have beaten up one of the Red Wing fans in the parking lot, you know, those guys wearing the Teamsters jackets and a glare. Of how Red Wing fans bring buckets filled with an octopus to the game even though they aren’t allowed to throw them on the ice any more while Duck fans know their octopus only in the form of calamari. Of how maybe hockey means more when you play in Hockeytown because there sometimes seems so little else to celebrate about Detroit.

Or maybe the Red Wings are just way better.

But if it’s true, as Selanne says, that the Ducks will watch a tape of Friday’s first period because it is necessary to see the destruction with wide-open eyes and then learn from it instead of getting squeamish, the question becomes, how much is it possible to learn in 36 hours?

Do you learn, in 36 hours, to give a hit? Do you decide, in 36 hours, to run toward something, the puck, your opponents’ goal, instead of skating backward, constantly backward?

As defenseman Kevin Haller said, “It’s frustrating to constantly be in your own end.”

And the Red Wings don’t seem at all inclined to let the Ducks spend time anywhere else.

Anaheim Coach Craig Hartsburg said, in all seriousness, that the Ducks “won the third period. We have to look at every little positive thing we can. I know someone will write something smartass about it, but we gotta take whatever we can get. We need more people just to compete during the game. Pay a price along the boards, get the puck out in front of our net. That’s the most important thing.”

But this is not smartass. This is reality. Winning the third period when you’ve lost the first, 4-0, means nothing. If the Ducks have pride, they must win the first period Sunday. Or the first minute anyway. Really, now, there can be no thoughts of winning the series. But it would be nice to earn some respectability.

Hartsburg also said, “I don’t think we competed hard enough. That’s why Detroit has won two Stanley Cups. To a man, they compete. It’s a lesson we have to learn and we have to learn it quick.”

Whatever lessons the Ducks learn Sunday and Tuesday, those will be lessons for next season though. Which won’t be a bad thing as long as they earn back some respect this season. That’s what Sunday will be about.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com