Hero play from Vatanen results in a goal at the other end of the ice.

This moment will almost assuredly make it on every New Jersey Devils' end of season highlight reel and it may in fact go down as one of the best sequences of the season all together.

On Friday night the aforementioned Devils were facing off against the Ottawa Senators in a battle of 2 teams who were desperate to make up ground in their respective divisions. As it turns out it would be New Jersey's night as they easily defeated the Senators by an eventual margin of 5 - 2, but it was quite possibly one play in the 2nd period that broke the Senators spirits in this contest. 

The Senators were already down by a considerable margin, 4 - 1, with just a little over 5 minutes played in the game's 2nd frame but they were given a golden opportunity to close the gap to just 2 goals. A hard shot from the point was too much for veteran Devil's goaltender Keith Kinkaid to control, although he did make the initial stop, and it resulted in a big juicy rebound for Senators rookie Brady Tkachuk. Tkachuk likely believed that he had one of the easiest goals of his young career in the National Hockey League, he was after all staring at a ton of empty net, but a heroic defensive play from Devils' defenseman Sami Vatanen shut that down.

As Tkachuk fired the puck into the wide open net Vatanen slide across the crease and batted it out of the air right on the Devil's goal line, going into the Devils' net in the process along with one of his fellow teammates. Vatanen admired the puck from inside of the net but to his credit it had never crossed the goal line, leaving the Senators momentarily stunned as a result. 

That was all the time that Devils' forwards Kyle Palmieri and Taylor Hall needed to create a break in the other direction, and after fighting the bouncing puck for a moment they were off to the races for a 2 on 0. Unsurprisingly given the level of skill between these two forwards they managed to find the back of the net on their breakaway, resulting in an amazing end to end play to give the Devils' a 5 - 1 lead.

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