The group chat did not jinx Brady Tkachuk into a natural hat trick. Pucks don't read your posts, and a career scorer coming off a cold week is about the most predictable thing in hockey. Clowning him for being pointless to start the season just set you up to look silly on Tuesday.
And look silly you did. Tkachuk scored his first three goals of the season in the second period against the Columbus Blue Jackets, powering Florida to a 7-3 win at Nationwide Arena. He tied it 1-1 at 2:27, put the Panthers ahead 2-1 on the power play at 6:00, and finished the natural hat trick with another power-play goal at 10:30. Three goals in a span of 8:03. The fourth hat trick of his career, and it landed on the exact night a lot of people had decided he couldn't buy one.
What caused it had nothing to do with karma: Matthew Tkachuk. The older brother assisted on all three goals, then added a helper on Carter Verhaeghe's power-play goal at 17:50 for five on the night. Brady got the loud number. Matthew spent the second period hand-feeding him the loud number. It's two elite players on the same unit doing what the whole league already feared they'd do.
The mockery-deserved-punishment version of this story is the fun one, and it's easy to see why people who root against Florida are enjoying the particular cruelty of it. Watching a team you can't stand eat a sibling-assisted hat trick is a genuinely funny way to lose. But who earned what is simple: the joke writers earned nothing. They didn't move the needle or summon the goals, and they don't get to claim the result as payback for their own trash talk. A slump ended because a good player stopped missing.
The lazy counter is that this was a fluke, a freak eruption against a team having a bad night. That's cope. The goal at 2:27 counts. The two power-play goals count. Columbus let Florida's best line run wild for a period and paid for it. Pretending the scoreboard is somehow illegitimate because it embarrassed the mockers is exactly the self-flattery that started this. Brady Tkachuk was always going to score. He's done it four times to the tune of a hat trick now. The only surprising thing about Tuesday was how fast it all arrived once it started.
Keep the jokes if they were funny. Just drop the part where you take a bow for them. The Tkachuks are very good at hockey, and they reminded everyone of that in eight minutes flat.
