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By Claude McGyver, Hellcats beat writer for The Athletic

COLOGNE — Five weeks ago, the Radnor Rink Rats walked into MühlenArena am Dom and won 8-1, and everything that has happened to the Cologne Hellcats since flowed from that night — the slide, the six straight losses, the press conference, the questions about whether this team could win anything when it mattered.

On Wednesday, in their first game that actually counted, the Hellcats answered with the only number that could possibly have done it justice.

Eight to one. The same scoreline. This time, the other way.

Cologne opened its first-round series against the Munich Black Frost by handing out the exact beating it had absorbed to start all of this — eight goals on 36 shots, a four-goal second period that turned a tied game into a rout, and the kind of complete, hungry, sixty-minute performance that has been missing since the calendar said winter. The team that limped into the playoffs at 4-6 over its final ten games did not look anything like that team. It looked like the one from the autumn, the one that briefly led the entire league, the one everybody had spent a month wondering if they'd ever see again.

<h2>Maatta, of all people</h2>

The unlikeliest part of an unlikely night belonged to a defenseman. Olli Maatta scored twice — both on the power play, at 18:01 of the second and again in the third — and added an assist for a three-point game, the sort of line a blueliner posts maybe once in a career.

"Once we got rolling in the second, we just kept coming in waves," Maatta said. "Everybody was moving the puck, everybody was hungry. Nights like this, you ride it as far as it'll go."

They rode it a long way. After Dougie Hamilton opened the scoring and Alexis Lafreniere answered to make it 1-1 through one, the floodgates broke: DeBrincat, Kucherov, Forsberg, and Maatta in the second, then Maatta again, Kelly, and Johansson piling on after the intermission. Karel Vejmelka was pulled after four goals on 15 shots. His replacement fared no better. Munich, a team that closed the regular season on an 8-2 tear and arrived as arguably the hottest club in the bracket, was undone by exactly the kind of undisciplined, cluster-conceding hockey that had defined Cologne's own collapse — two of Maatta's goals came on Munich power-play giveaways.

The symmetry was almost unfair.

<h2>The other constant</h2>

Behind all of it was the one thing that never actually left during the dark weeks. Logan Thompson stopped 29 of 30, surrendering only Lafreniere's first-period marker, and gave his team the platform to play without fear.

"Logan was unbelievable," Hamilton said. "When you've got your goalie locking the door like that, you can play with confidence. It frees up the whole group."

That has been the quiet truth of this entire stretch. Even when the Hellcats couldn't score, couldn't stay out of the box, couldn't hold a lead, Thompson kept giving them a chance. On Wednesday, for once, the team in front of him gave him an eight-goal cushion to enjoy.

It is worth saying clearly, because the temptation after a night like this is to forget it: this was one game. Cologne played one electric period against Stuttgart three weeks ago and it turned out to be a mirage. Munich is too good, and finished the season too hot, for an 8-1 result to be the honest measure of this series. Stuart Skinner will be sharper. Pastrnak and Konecny will not post that plus-minus again. The Black Frost will be a different, angrier team in Game 2, which stays in Cologne on a quick turnaround.

But there is a difference between one good period and one complete game, and the Hellcats had been searching for the latter for a month. On the biggest possible night to find it, they did.

Sebastian Horn, who stood at a podium five weeks ago and said he had built a team to win in May, watched the whole thing from above the ice. Afterward, he kept it short.

"That was one game," the general manager said. "But yes. That was the team I was talking about."

He did not smile when he said it. He did not need to. For the first time since the Rink Rats came to town and broke something in this season, the team and the scoreboard agreed with him.

Eight to one. The right way around. Game 2 is Friday.

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