Ducks Take Nonchalant Approach to Big Victory

It’s OK to start working on your draw sheets. Filling out the brackets. Anticipating possible second-round pairings. Maybe even third-round pairings.

Yep, hockey fever. Catch it.

If most of you were doing your NCAA draw sheets, there were 17,174 people at the Pond dreaming of another tournament. The NHL Stanley Cup tournament, the one the Mighty Ducks will almost certainly be in this season.

The Ducks beat the Detroit Red Wings, the team that currently owns the Stanley Cup, 3-1, Sunday. This is a big deal. There have been seven straight wins now for your Ducks but the first six came against teams with losing records and so, despite protests by Coach Craig Hartsburg to the contrary, it was hard not to see this game against the Red Wings as something of a measuring stick, a way to prove that the 69 points the Ducks have (which is only one fewer than Detroit, by the way) are meaningful, a way to see if the Ducks would just be so much first-round filler in the playoffs or a team that might think about playing hockey well into May.

There was still an air of hesitancy at the Pond for the first 13 minutes or so of this game. It was a healthy contingent of Red Wing fans, in fact, that provided noise with a constant, annoying drumbeat chant of “Let’s go Red Wings, let’s go Red Wings,” to which Anaheim fans responded to cleverly by saying, “Boo.”

But then left wing Marty McInnis took a Teemu Selanne rebound and slapped it right past Detroit goalie Chris Osgood. McInnis raised his stick while Hartsburg licked his lips and nodded, yes, which is the same as any other man shooting off fireworks and leaping over the boards in jubilation.

“Definitely, in a game like this, to go ahead early makes a difference,” Hartsburg said. “Especially for a team like us. It allowed us to gain some confidence right away.”

Another bit of confidence was gained later in the first period when the Ducks survived a two-man disadvantage for 1 minute 15 seconds. Once, Ruslan Salei took a dive and somehow threw his stick onto the puck with enough strength to clear the zone. Jamie Pushor did nearly the same thing later. At the end of this defensive stand, the “Let’s go Red Wings” mantra had been stopped. Mighty Duck fans were standing up and cheering instead.

And when Steve Rucchin, who accepted a nifty pass from Paul Kariya, scored the game’s second goal in the second period to give the Ducks a 2-0 lead, when Kariya did a little dance step in celebration and the noise of the crowd grew and grew without even one prompt of “noise” from the electronic scoreboard, there was no getting around it.

The Ducks are officially exciting.

What is wonderful to see is not only the graceful, entrancing skating of Kariya and Selanne but also the perky checking and grown-up way the Ducks behave in tense situations. Like when Selanne, having just been smashed to the ice, a hit which was going to be a Detroit penalty, jumped up and stopped Fredrik Olausson from a hasty retaliation penalty which would have negated Anaheim’s advantage. You could read Selanne’s lips as he sped toward Olausson. “No, no.”

Also nice to notice was afterward in the Ducks’ locker room. There was no wild celebration. No unseemly exuberance. Just simple acceptance that, yes, they had played well and earned an exciting win against a top-notch team. A win that will mean nothing special on Monday except that Hartsburg gave the Ducks a day off.

“Definitely,” said Rucchin, “it was a lot of fun tonight and it is a pretty big win for us over a pretty tough team. It was a nice atmosphere, a little bit of a playoff feel and it was a big boost for everybody. But there’s also a long way to go and things can change pretty quick if you’re not careful.”

Kariya, in a rare burst of bravado, said that “this was a good test for us,” which means, possibly, “whoopee, yippee, wow.” But the thing is, the Ducks were behaving as if they were not surprised to have won this game.

“This team doesn’t allow itself to get too high or too low,” Hartsburg said. To say that the Ducks could use this game as a gauge of any kind “is silly,” Hartsburg said. A team should only gauge itself in the playoffs, according to the coach.

But, still, who can help it? For the first time since Feb. 14, the Ducks played a team with a winning record and they won. For the first time in nearly two years they beat the Red Wings. They won nicely in a game where they were the pacesetters. “It was a great hockey game,” Hartsburg said. “Both teams battled and both teams played like they hated each other. Everybody should leave the building happy.”

Well, not everybody. Those cocky chanters in red left quietly. And maybe left thinking that they won’t want their team playing these Ducks in those playoffs.

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