Jakub Lauko is a real hockey guy, confirmed!
Earlier this season, his face was gashed open by a skate blade in a scary incident. Lauko got away without serious injuries, but the cut wasn’t far from his eye, which could have led to catastrophic consequences.
Lauko missed a couple of weeks but returned to playing with just a visor to cover his face, although he still played with some restrictions.
Due to his injury, Lauko didn’t have permission to fight during games. But this week, things changed, and he was given the green light to drop the mitts. He didn’t wait long to get back to business.
In Tuesday’s matchup with the Minnesota Wild, Lauko fought Connor Dewar just 7:48 into the game, almost immediately after the Wild had scored a goal to make it 1-0.
Lauko dropped Dewar to the ice before raising his arm, getting the crowd pumped up. While Lauko was still in the penalty box, David Pastrnak scored, tying the game.
“Lauko said about the game that ended in a 4-3 OT loss for the Bruins, ‘It was the first week I got kind of like a green light to fight, so I went into this game like the first time that I could actually do my thing and play my game. Obviously, when you can fight, you can just go around and like run around trying to hit everyone. So this was the first game that I could play the way I wanted to.'”
Lauko was praised by his coach for fighting at the first opportunity and the positive effect it had on the Bruins team.
“A lot. You know, it was great,” Montgomery said about how much energy it gave the Bruins. “It got us into it, and I thought we picked up our intensity after that. Because I thought that they had just scored, and I thought that we were a little flat. So he picked us up.”
But the appreciation for the fight wasn’t limited to just his coach and teammates.
As Lauko was heading to the penalty box, cameras found the most hyped-up fan in all of TD Garden, and it happened to be a young fan who screamed his lungs out in excitement at what he had just witnessed.
The video of the young kid quickly went viral, and fans found it absolutely hilarious how much the young fan loved it.
“That child is all of us,” one Boston fan said. “Core memory. F—k yeah, kid,” another said. “Gotta love it!,” a third added.
