Daily Hab-it: Is this a turning point for Price?

I don't want to make too much of the second game of the season, but could Saturday night's 3-2 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins be a reversal of fortunes of sorts for Carey Price?

How many times last season did Price play tremendously, only to lose the game 2-1 or 3-2 and then have his won-loss record thrown back in his face?

It looked like the exact same thing would happen in Pittsburgh on Saturday night as Price allowed the 34th shot he faced to slip through his wickets, giving the Penguins a 2-1 third period lead with the Canadiens seemingly unable to generate anything offensively.

But then Michael Cammalleri continued his cruel haunting of Marc-Andre Fleury by tipping a Josh Gorges shot past him for his second goal of the game at 17:48 of the third to tie it up.

That gives Cammalleri nine goals in his last eight games against Fleury.

Then, with Fleury still muttering to himself over that goal, he lets a totally soft shot by Scott Gomez – his first of the season – slip between his pads only 24 seconds later.

Just like that, and the Canadiens were ahead 3-2. But more importantly Price was rewarded for keeping his team in it long enough for them to make the comeback.

He finished with 36 saves, perhaps none bigger than a point-blank beauty on Evgeni Malkin a few minutes after Mark Letestu had scored to put Pittsburgh ahead.

The other day I wrote Price was starting to get a tendency to give up bad goals at the wrong time, but that was a huge save at the perfect time because if Malkin makes it 3-1, the Canadiens would have started the season 0-2.

So, seeing as the exact same game last season almost definitely would have ended with a Canadiens loss, could this have been a turning point for Price and his teammates? Could this be the end of the Twilight Zone-like dimension Price was in last year where his teammates refused to score any goals in his games but proceeded to light it up for Halak?

I'm not sure because, after all, this was only one game, No. 2 of 82.

But all I know was that as I was watching Price make spectacular save after spectacular save in the second period, yet the game remained 1-1, I got this horrible sense of Déjà vu. It was almost predictable that the Penguins would score a goal, and that the goal would be stoppable (which it was), and that it would be the lasting memory for all the legions of Price haters in Montreal.

Then just as it seemed that exact scenario was about to come to pass, it didn't.

I don't remember every single game Price played last year, but it feels like that didn't happen one time while he hard-lucked his way to a horrendous won-lost record.

So perhaps, just perhaps, this was the dawn of a new era for Price.

Or maybe it was just a big road win against a team that had all the motivation in the world to beat the Habs.

Either way, it's good news for the young man trying to win over his own fan base.