Vegas and Carolina put on a show to get the Stanley Cup Final off to a terrific start

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Colton Sissons smiled widely and raved about how much fun it was to play in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final on Tuesday night.

He and the Vegas Golden Knights traded chances, goals, saves and counterpunches with the Carolina Hurricanes, getting the championship series off to a terrific start. Vegas won a high-scoring, entertaining 5-4 affair that usually would drive an old-school coach like John Tortorella crazy.

“I think he enjoyed it,” Sissons said. “Obviously the result.”

It was a game so good even Torts enjoyed it.

Game 1 had a little bit of everything, from Nikolaj Ehlers scoring 25 seconds in for the Hurricanes and lifting an already riled-up crowd to its feet to each goaltender making big saves to keep the puck out of the net. The only thing missing was the lockdown defense that got these teams to this point, but that only made for a more exciting opener.

“Both teams played good defense for certain minutes, other times not,” Tortorella said. “You just never know what’s going to happen.”

What happened was a lot of scoring from two of the best defensive teams in the playoffs. It was the first Cup final game in history with a goal in the first 30 seconds of each of the first two periods.

Ehlers scored his first off the rush and second on a breakaway. The two-goal lead lasted all of 80 seconds before Shea Theodore scored, and Ivan Barbashev and William Karlsson put Vegas ahead, rallying from another deficit.

“It was great from our group to kind of battle back,” Theodore said.

Jordan Staal scoring his first goal at this stage of the playoffs since 2009 and breaking older brother Eric’s record for the longest gap between Cup final goals brought the crowd back to life. So did Shayne Gostisbehere tying it with under nine minutes left in regulation.

With time ticking closer to overtime, the Golden Knights made one more highlight-reel play in a night full of them. Colton Sissons’ backhand pass set up Tomas Hertl — who also had a rough go the first couple of rounds — for the go-ahead goal with 3:34 left in regulation.

Long before Sissons and Hertl teamed up on the winner, each guy was denied on a Grade-A scoring chance by Carolina's Frederik Andersen. At the other end of the rink, Carter Hart made some 10-bell saves of his own.

Logan Stankoven got in all alone on a breakaway in the first with a chance to break the game open.

“That could’ve been a dagger," Sissons said.

Instead, Hart made that save and kept Vegas in the game throughout. His best came with under four minutes left and the score tied, flashing his glove to rob Seth Jarvis, Carolina’s top-line right wing whose snakebit struggle of a run continued.

“He gives us so much confidence,” Sissons said. “When we needed him most, he was there.”

The start of the Cup final quickly got the NHL past a lackluster third round, when Vegas swept Colorado in the West and Carolina bounced back from a rough start against Montreal, winning four in a row to blow through the East final roadblock that had been an issue for so long.

Fans were buzzing from pregame warmups, and the two teams put on a show worth the hefty price of admission.

“I thought it was a great game from both sides,” Theodore said. “That’s a loud building to play in front of."

After a ton of excitement between two hockey powerhouses, viewers can only hope for six more games just like this one.

AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

Vegas Golden Knights celebrate a goal by Tomas Hertl, during the third period in Game 1 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Final series against the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday, June 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)

Vegas Golden Knights' Pavel Dorofeyev (16) celebrates between Carolina Hurricanes' Jalen Chatfield (5), Alexander Nikishin (21), and goaltender Frederik Andersen (31) after a goal in the second period of Game 1 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Final series in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday, June 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Ben McKeown)

Vegas Golden Knights' Tomas Hertl (48) trips over Carolina Hurricanes goaltender Frederik Andersenn (31) during the second period in Game 1 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Final series in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday, June 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)

Vegas Golden Knights' William Karlsson (71) scores a goal past Carolina Hurricanes' Frederik Andersen (31) during the second period of Game 1 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Final series in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday, June 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Ben McKeown)

Ewan McGregor, for a fleeting moment after “Trainspotting” came out, felt like a rock star.

It wasn’t his first significant project; it wasn’t even his first film with director Danny Boyle. And he was, in his words, fairly arrogant and cocksure at the time. But that kinetic film about four heroin addicts in late-1980s Scotland was and, 30 years later, remains defining — in his career, in the culture and in his understanding of what true artistic satisfaction can feel like.

“It’s very much in that early part of my career, and of course, even today, probably the most important piece of work that I was involved in, just because it had such a massive effect on my life. Not only because of what it did, but because of how it felt to make,” McGregor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It set the bar unknowingly high because it’s been quite hard to match ever since.”

Both McGregor and Boyle are a little wistful about the time, and what they made, on the eve of its 30th anniversary re-release. Starting Friday, a 4K digital restoration will be in theaters nationwide. Though “Trainspotting” was very much of its moment with its Britpop soundtrack, its Thatcher-era grit, its darkly comedic tone and shrewd blend of giddy highs and tragic lows, it’s also one that has stood the unforgiving test of time.

“You get kids coming up to you who are 17 who said they’d just seen it,” Boyle said. “I could be their grandfather … yet it still spoke to them.”

Boyle was a hot commodity after “Shallow Grave,” a 1994 black comedy about flatmates in Edinburgh starring McGregor, and Hollywood was calling. Literally. A peak-famous Sharon Stone cold-called him and asked if he’d want to come make a film with her. But he had his sights set on Irvine Welsh’s buzzy debut novel, teaming once again with screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald.

The budget would be small, 1.5 million pounds or about $1.9 million, and the shoot would be quick and local. They didn’t know what they didn’t know: Boyle remembers asking his cinematographer, the late Brian Tufano, if they could use an anal probe camera for the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene.

“I remember him saying, ‘Well, Danny, yes, you can get that. But I’m not sure how Ewan and his family and agent will feel about that,’” Boyle said with a laugh. “He tempered my kind of extreme way of approaching this material.”

And somehow it all worked, driven by youthful energy, a bit of arrogance and a passionate commitment to the material.

“‘Trainspotting’ had to be made that way,” said McGregor, who was 23 at the time. “It would have been a disaster if it had been done differently.”

For McGregor, at least part of the vitality came from the fact that they were shooting on film; money was going through the camera on every take.

“We shoot on these cards now, and it just doesn’t matter anymore,” McGregor said. “There’s no natural sort of like rhythm to filmmaking like there used to be then. … I think back to ‘Shallow Grave’ and ‘Trainspotting’ and it feels almost like a different job.”

Boyle too has been chasing that kind of innocence ever since. He said he might have come close on his upcoming film “Ink,” with Jack O’Connell.

“It was liberating not having enough money because you don’t have that limitation of thinking, oh, that’s going to be too extreme for the studio or for the audience reach we’re meant to have,” Boyle said. “You could make it so that if it didn’t work, you just, you know, sulk away with your tail between your legs and call back Sharon Stone and say ‘I was wrong.’”

Like any film about drugs, there was a fair amount of discourse around its release. U.S. presidential candidate Bob Dole even denounced it, unseen, for romanticizing heroin during his campaign. But the film was in the conversation — and it had an enviable group of supporters, including Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and Blur’s Damon Albarn, both of whom provided songs for the film.

After “Trainspotting” became a hit, life changed profoundly for McGregor. In London, he said, “it was madness.” At the time he was sharing a flat with his co-star Jonny Lee Miller, Jude Law and Sean Pertwee. When they’d go out to clubs, they felt like rock stars.

“There was a real energy around it,” McGregor said. “We were part of that, you see, the Blur and Oasis and Pulp and The Verve and all of that amazing music that was happening then. We were the sort of movie version of it, I guess, because Danny knew what he was doing with the soundtrack and because the novel was so huge and current and … and maybe because it was ours. It was British and it wasn’t pandering to America. We didn’t make it for America.”

Boyle hopes that audiences take a chance on “Trainspotting” in the theater, whether they're revisiting it or seeing it for the first time. It was, he said, made with an absolute love of cinema.

“It’s very indebted to ‘Goodfellas,’ which also has that feeling of: You are here to be absolutely assaulted by an experience,” Boyle said. “You know, you have given us your money and you’ve given us your time to be here for 90 minutes, two hours, whatever it is, and we promise, we promise to deliver everything to you that we can.”

FILE - Director Danny Boyle poses in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 6, 2017. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - Director Danny Boyle poses in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 6, 2017. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - John Hodge, screenwriter for "Trainspotting," left, director Danny Boyle, center, and producer Andrew Macdonald appear during a music video shoot in London on June 26, 1996. (AP Photo/Louisa Buller, File)