Trafficking in Victory, for the First Time

This historic first Stanley Cup finals victory by a Southern California team at home, how did you think it would end?

A dude named Rusty taking the puck from a dude named Oatsie and putting it past a dude named Marty.

A center-ice traffic jam. Horns blowing. Smog rising. Thousands rubber-necking and shouting.

Locals like, hey, cool.

“Doing whatever you can to stay alive,” said Keith Carney.

“Had to get something going,” said Kurt Sauer.

Just another late-spring Southland night on a frozen puddle, this Mighty Duck 3-2 overtime victory over the New Jersey Devils Saturday at the Pond in Game 3 of the finals.

There were dozens of Sig-Alerts. The Ducks collided with the Devils from board to board, picking up as many penalties as in the first two games combined -- five -- with twice as much intimidation.

“They looked bigger out there,” said Devil goaltender Martin Brodeur.

There was a crashing surf. The Ducks relentlessly wore down the Devils through the first two and a half periods, then took 11 of the game’s last 14 shots, including the final swell that was Ruslan “Rusty” Salei’s game-winning shot.

“They were more physical tonight than they had been in the series, and I think in the end, it affected our legs,” Devil defenseman Scott Stevens said.

Finally, and most appropriately, there was a freaky act of nature. What would a party around here be without one?

The Devils were minding their business amid a 1-1 tie in the second period, and guess what comes sliding down through their backyard and crashes through their window?

Brodeur’s stick.

He reached out to slap an idle and innocent shot by Sandis Ozolinsh, and lost his stick. The puck idly and innocently hit the stick and ricocheted behind him and into the net.

The momentum in the only other Stanley Cup finals in these parts was changed because a stick possessed too much curve, remember? Could momentum change here because a stick didn’t contain enough hand?

“For a split second there, you lost your breath,” the Devils’ Scott Gomez said.

And then you ... howled?

“They were laughing at me,” Brodeur said of his teammates. “You didn’t think it was funny? I thought it was funny. It’s definitely not fun to get scored on like that, but it’s something you can’t control.”

The Devils rebounded to tie the score in the third period when Gomez slipped in past Carney and deflected a Grant Marshall shot into the net past an increasingly upright Jean-Sebastien Giguere.

But when it stretched into overtime, you knew it was over.

This spring, the wide-eyed Ducks have been like those distracted types who wait to finish everything until the last minute. The Devils, meanwhile, are the sort of veterans who are occasionally impatient to clock out.

Giguere is now 6-0 in career postseason overtimes, all this season, while Brodeur is 8-17 in that same category.

“No one wants to be embarrassed, we knew they would come out and work harder,” Stevens said of the Ducks.

And, better desperate than never, the Ducks certainly did that, winning an impressive 63 percent of the faceoffs, including the final one, which Adam Oates won from Pascal Rheaume to set up Salei.

Paul Kariya had three times as many shots (three) as in the first two games combined. Ozolinsh, with four shots, had twice as many.

Salei’s winner means that, in the Ducks’ 10 postseason playoff victories that came in the third period or overtime, eight different Ducks have scored the winning goal.

“It’s a series again,” said Gomez, this one sweeping gesture moving his team from the verge of a championship to a two-games-to-one lead. “Everybody wrote them off but us.”

A Southern California series, complete with scantily clad ice scrapers (tacky) and constant big-screen scoreboard shots of blonds in the stands (tackier).

And, oh yeah, Jiggy.

While you could barely hear his trademark song over the consistent roar of 17,174 fans, it didn’t matter, because his best save occurred before the game.

It was on Friday afternoon, actually.

The Ducks’ flight from New Jersey landed, the weary players were bused to the Pond, they trudged into the dressing room ... and Giguere woke them up.

Those harsh words about lack of effort that he uttered during that day’s interviews?

That’s what he told them to their faces, and then some.

“He said the same things in the room,” Sauer said. “He talked about us needing emotion. He said a lot of things. And he was right. We needed to hear it.”

Today it is the Devils whose ears are a bit red, complementing their stinging necks and burning cheeks. This may be Southern California, but, fellas, that’s not the sun.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com