Column: Ducks, a 2-1 winner over Wild, hoping to raise game

If you didn’t think to look for it or didn’t happen to glance up at the green-girdered roof Friday while the Ducks were opening their home schedule with a 2-1 come-from-behind victory over the Minnesota Wild, it would have been easy to miss the new banner hanging at the east end of Honda Center.

The banner, which commemorates the Ducks’ 2013-14 Pacific Division championship, was raised sometime this summer. Maybe in August, a team spokesman said. He wasn’t sure. The banner, displayed alongside a similar one from 2012-13, went up without any fanfare — and without any fans cheering its ascent.

Which is exactly how the Ducks wanted it. Some players didn’t even realize it was there.

“Nope. Didn’t know it,” said fleet forward Andrew Cogliano, who launched the comeback with a short-handed goal early in the third period. “Those banners, they count for something, but they really don’t.”

The Ducks had raised their 2013 banner with the same deliberate stealth, figuring that a division title wasn’t much worth celebrating after their first-round playoff loss to the Detroit Red Wings. Their disappointment cut more deeply last spring after their seven-game, second-round playoff loss to the Kings, a sour memory the Ducks have tucked away in their minds for motivation this season.

Because that loss stung them so deeply, they had no intention of making a special occasion out of this division banner, either. It would have seemed especially silly after the Kings had raised a Stanley Cup banner last week, the Kings’ second championship in three seasons.

Team captain Ryan Getzlaf said it was pretty much General Manager Bob Murray’s call not to make a fuss over the 2013 division title, but Murray consulted him first to get a sense of the sentiment in the locker room. Once the precedent was set, it stuck.

“We felt the same way down here,” Getzlaf said Friday morning, “that it was nothing to pop champagne over, so to speak.”

It wasn’t the banner they’d hoped for, wasn’t a Stanley Cup banner, and after winning the Cup in 2007 they’ve rightfully come to believe that anything short of the Cup is nice but isn’t worth patting themselves on the back.

“We have one goal,” Murray said. “We are striving for more.”

As well they should. The Ducks have been a superb regular-season team lately, but it’s time for them to carry that over into the playoffs.

They know it. And they said as much by not saying anything Friday about that new banner and instead letting their grit and resilience speak for them as they ran their winning streak to four.

“We don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” Coach Bruce Boudreau said after Friday’s morning skate, “because in the end I think no matter how great it feels to win the division against the teams that are in our division, if you don’t go further than that, then nobody cares about the division at that point.

“It is saying something that you won it, but we want no fanfare with that. We just want to go out and do our job and hopefully it will be a bigger banner there at some point in the next year.”

The Ducks got the job done Friday with a third-period rally against the Wild, which is one of many Western Conference teams that improved over the summer and further drove up the competitive pitch in an already rugged and deep conference.

Minnesota used its speed well Friday and dominated for long stretches, but the Ducks persevered, pulling even on Cogliano’s goal and surging ahead on Corey Perry’s second-effort score at 11:35 of the third period.

“There’s going to be a lot of games like this, where sometimes it doesn’t go our way, but we scraped away,” said Perry, who’s off to a career-best start this season with five goals and seven points in five games. “It’s a battle each and every night and you’ve got to be ready to play.”

If their goaltending holds up as well as it did Friday, when Frederik Andersen made 27 saves, and their kids turn potential into production, the Ducks could have many nights like this between now and April. The trick is to have them in May and June too, and earn a banner worth fussing over at their next home opener.

“It’s nice to win the division. It’s nice to win the conference like we did, but at the end of the day it means nothing,” Cogliano said. “The only goal is the Stanley Cup and until you win that, that’s the only banner you celebrate.”

Twitter: @helenenothelen