All heart, and they’ll shed blood to prove it

Ducks Coach Randy Carlyle said he was as nervous as he had ever been before a game.

Win, and his team would advance to the second round of the playoffs. Lose, and it would have to go back to Minnesota and face a rejuvenated Wild team in front of its home crowd.

“I knew it was going to be tight right down to the end,” he said.

Good thing that his players were loose.

The Ducks, who won so much notice this season for being physically tough, proved on Thursday that toughness extends to discipline and perseverance and taking a stick in the mouth if the payoff is gaining a power play. Their 4-1 victory at the Honda Center was bloody, sweaty, emotional and a playoff masterpiece, earning them probably a week’s rest while their Western Conference rivals pound and push each other into submission.

“We talked before the game and said, ‘Let’s play at the level we’re capable of.’ We know we have a chance to win if we do that,” said winger Teemu Selanne, who got a 10-stitch cut above his right eye before the game after being struck by an errant puck and got a smaller cut over his left eye to match it after he was struck by a high stick in the second period.

“We weren’t nervous. Not at all.”

Nor was Ryan Getzlaf, whose power-play goal put the Ducks ahead merely 47 seconds after a short-handed goal by Marian Gaborik had allowed Minnesota to pull even.

“Our group was pretty relaxed,” he said. “I was excited, but I was confident in our group.”

And with good reason.

Selanne never stopped moving and testing the Wild defense with his speed and shiftiness. Defenseman Francois Beauchemin, weakened by medication to treat a recent jaw injury, wasn’t sure he’d have the energy to stand up, let alone play. Still, he managed to play a game-high 28 minutes 32 seconds and took four shots.

Chris Pronger was on the ice for all of a two-man disadvantage in the second period that lasted nearly three minutes, pushing opponents out of the slot, banging the puck off the boards, stretching his remarkable wingspan to reach the puck and clear it out of harm’s way on the rare occasions that goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere left a rebound.

“Chris Pronger is a unique athlete,” Carlyle said. “Obviously, that was the key to the hockey game.”

Pronger merely called it fun.

“When we’re skating like we did tonight, we’re a tough team to beat,” he said.

“With the different types of adversity you face through the course of a game, you’ve got to be tough. The things we’ve gone through this season, losing guys to injury, you learn a lot. You learn when things don’t go your way to take a step back, take a breather.”

Giguere, making his first start since March 31, has gotten too familiar with adversity in the last few weeks. His son, Maxime, was born April 4 with a malformed right eye, and Giguere had been away from the team for a week while doctors tested the baby’s left eye to be sure that was not affected, too.

Without daily practice to sharpen his reflexes, he wasn’t ready to start the opener against Minnesota. Ilya Bryzgalov started and won that game, and the next two, while Giguere regained his conditioning; Bryzgalov was replaced by Giguere late in the Ducks’ Game 4 loss at Minnesota and Carlyle said he went with his gut in selecting Giguere to start Thursday.

“I thought his teammates would like to see him play,” Carlyle said.

Almost as much as Giguere himself wanted to play. He was solid in stopping 26 shots and seemed to attract the puck as if it were a magnet. Later, in the locker room, he cradled his infant son in his arms, enjoying the baby’s first hockey game.

“It’s been an emotional couple weeks. I won’t lie to you. A lot of things have happened in the course of two, three weeks,” he said.

“Just getting back in there and winning a big hockey game was awesome. But most of the job was done already. The guys did a great job and Bryz did a great job in the first four games. Today, it was just a matter of coming in and trying to do your job.”

The Ducks did an admirable job against a team with superb speed, an excellent goaltender in the agile Niklas Backstrom, and the impeccable coaching of Jacques Lemaire. “Our guys were trying hard,” Lemaire said, “but they just ran out of juice.”

They ran out because the Ducks squeezed it out of them. Although the hostilities initiated when Ducks enforcer Brad May sucker-punched Wild defenseman Kim Johnsson on Tuesday bubbled over to Thursday and the teams came together in a scrum during the warmups, the Ducks showed poise and patience and smarts when it mattered.

They were bloodied. “I look like Rocky,” Selanne said, smiling.

But they were unbowed, and they go on to the next round of what promises to be a long playoff run. Toughness comes in many forms, and the Ducks appear well-stocked in every aspect.

helene.elliott@latimes.com