Andre Burakovsky, one of those talented players who can’t get out of his own way, put the Capitals, historically lost playoff souls, into the Stanley Cup final. Out of Barry Trotz’s doghouse Burakovsky sprung in Game Seven, erasing the Caps year-after-year failure to support Alex Ovechkin with two fell swoops, perfectly timed ones, too.

Burakovsky deflated the house and the favored Lightning. And the angels sang again for the unsung, as they always have this time of year.

“Who’s going to be the hero?” the Islanders challenged each other in a ritual before each of 12 overtime games they won out of 13 on the way to their mind-boggling 19 straight playoff series victories. There were nine different overtime scorers, including Bryan Trottier, Denis Potvin and Mike Bossy as you would expect, but also Wayne Merrick, Anders Kallur and two each by Bob Nystrom and Ken Morrow, the latter a superb defenseman whose regular season high in goals was five.

We saw again in Game One, when Tomas Nosek scored twice and Ryan Reaves had a second goal in two games, that you never know who is going to leap out of the weeds off the fourth line or the third pair to put themselves in the right place at the right time.

When Andy Warhol, a Pittsburgh guy, said everybody in the future will get 15 minutes of fame, he wasn’t exactly predicting Darius Kasparaitis, whose best season was four goals, would get one in playoff overtime for the Penguins. But he did. The artist –uh we mean Warhol, not Kasparaitis¬–grasped one of the essences of playoff hockey. The NHL always was much more prone to upsets, particularly in the early rounds, than the NFL and NBA. And parity has made the bounces of the puck harder to predict than ever.

Granted, with matchups and now analytics, we get paid to try to figure it out for the readers a little deeper than “gotta get pucks to the net.” And then in the end the championship is won on a routine puck to the net. What Dick Irvin, the Canadiens’ Hall of Fame coach, called the “Unseen Hand” swoops in when you least expect it, when actually we should know by now it is not unexpected at all but practically inevitable.

Here are some players who scored Stanley Cup winning goals: Alec Martinez, Dave Bolland, Max Talbot, Travis Moen, Frantisek Kaberle, Ruslan Fedotenko, Mike Rupp, Uwe Krupp, Yvan Lambert, Pierre Bouchard and Bob Kelly.

“I would imagine a lot of guys who did it turned over in their grave when I got one,” says Kelly. “But everybody gets a day and that was mine.”

A team needs talent, preparation and will to be good enough to get itself in position to win a Cup. But except when one team is vastly superior to the other – and in this era of the cap and parity when will see that again? – fate takes over in the end. Sort of like Bryan Bickell and Bolland within 17 seconds in the most stunning finish ever–2013.

Finals have turned on a stick measurement, a third-overtime goal with the scorer’s foot blatantly in the crease, a backup goalie conked in the warmup, a clearly offside goal, a puck from a deep angle that stuck, unseen, in the base of the goal, injuries and more goal posts than Nathan Lafayette could shake his stick at.

Such is the lore of The Cup, and also its lure. You gotta be good enough to get there, plus gracious enough afterwards to admit that the will imposed in your victory was not necessarily that by your own team. Alternatively, you can live out your days secure in the knowledge that you gave it your best and it just wasn’t meant to be.

In this final, you got two teams that assuredly seem meant to be. What we have here is the ultimate feel-good final, at least until one team feels very bad in the end.

The first-year Golden Knights are incomprehensibly three wins from the Cup, even if we can rattle off again ten sound reasons why they have gotten this far. The snake bitten Caps finally have broken through, ironically–but probably predictably–with a team not as deep as the last few that failed.

Go figure, meaning figure in somebody like Jay Beagle for at least a couple goals in the series. Washington is here in part because the largest payoff from this year’s trade deadline acquisition turned out to be not from Ryan McDonagh, Evander Kane, Derick Brassard, or Paul Stastny but Michal Kempny, in the deal probably most under the radar.

In Game One, the Knights fourth line scored three goals in the third period. Knock us over with a feather. Or John Carlson with a cross check by Reaves that was Unseen by two referees before he scored. Such are the fortunes of war. Little about the career of journeyman Brett Connolly tipped us off to that gorgeous backhand tip.

When it is over we will not be able to claim prescience. After years of writing that the Caps finally will have their run after everybody assumes their time has passed, we finally quit predicting that this year. So any forecast of a watershed moment for Chandler Stevenson over the next two weeks will have no credibility, even if we tell you it’s coming.

Practically every rejected member of the Golden Knights except for Marc Andre Fleury is eligible to ride in a Stanley Cup parade down The Strip in a pumpkin. The whole team is out of nowhere and divides its even strength ice time so equally that there are 18 Allan Quines in the making.

See, we know exactly what we are talking about in telling you that nobody has any clue what is going to happen. The Unseen Hand is stirring as furiously in the caldron as the witches in Hamlet to give us something we never expected in a million years. Or, just the 101 of them that they have played NHL hockey.

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