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Jamie Benn and the Dallas Stars won’t be in the playoffs. Still Luke Willson Jersey , they gave the Los Angeles Kings a good preview of how tough raising the Stanley Cup might be.

Benn had a natural hat trick in the first period and the Stars beat the Kings 4-2 on Saturday night.

It was Benn’s second hat trick in three games and the fourth of his career. Benn has seven goals during a three-game scoring streak.

Kari Lehtonen made 34 saves in his 445th and potential last game for the Stars before becoming a free agent this summer. Devin Shore also scored, and Alexander Radulov had three assists.

Dallas finished three points behind Colorado for the second wild-card in the Western Conference. The Stars went 0-6-2 in mid-March when starting goalie Ben Bishop sustained a knee injury, and that stretch of poor play loomed large in not making the playoffs for the second consecutive season.

”You hate to look back and wonder what you could have done different, but we played some pretty good hockey most of the year and didn’t raise our level when it needed to be raised. And here we are out of the playoffs now,” Benn said.

Alec Martinez scored twice and Jonathan Quick made 14 saves for the Kings, who will play Vegas in the first round of the playoffs after finishing as the first wild card from the Western Conference.

Benn made it 2-0 at 8:40, knocking the puck out of mid-air by swinging his stick like a baseball bat from close range.

Benn scored his second at 11:35 to put the Stars up 3-0. Benn tapped the puck into an open net after defenseman Oscar Fantenberg lost the puck in his own zone.

”You can’t blame our goalie on any of them. I think if you had two goalies in the net you might not get a save there because we had full possession of the puck on three of those plays,” Kings coach John Stevens said.

Benn got his hat trick at 13:57 by tipping Radulov’s pass past Quick for his 10th point during a five-game point streak. He has eight goals and two assists in that span.

The Stars took a 1-0 lead at 6:41. Shore scored on a backhand after poking the puck away from Kings defenseman Christian Folin. It was Shore’s 11th goal, and his third point (two goals, one assist) in five games.

“Obviously, that’s not a good enough start,” Martinez said. ”Quite frankly, it’s embarrassing. We left our goalie out to dry Dan Bailey Jersey Elite , and that’s not fair to him.”

Martinez scored on a slap shot at 3:42 in the second, getting the Kings on the board. He cut the deficit to 4-2 at 12:27 on a one-timer from Michael Amadio after a power play expired.

The Kings went 2-1-1 against the Golden Knights this season, winning back-to-back games on Feb. 26-27.

”Except the first period tonight, I think we’ve been playing pretty well the last couple games,” Kings center Adrian Kempe said. ”We got to bring it now. We need every single guy in the locker room. We need everybody to be at their best now. The fun starts right now. Hopefully everybody is ready for it.”

NOTES: Martinez has two goals and two assists during a three-game point streak. … Stars D John Klingberg had an assist, closing the season on a four-game point streak. … Kings F Torrey Mitchell (flu) missed his second straight game.

UP NEXT

Stars: End of regular season. Did not qualify for playoffs.

Kings: Visit the Golden Knights to start the first round.

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Jerry Kramer has basked in the attention on his key block on the winning play in the Ice Bowl for more than half a century.

He sure was uneasy, though, when Vince Lombardi told Bart Starr to run ”31 Wedge” from a yard out, the Green Bay Packers‘ dynasty dangling by a thread with 16 seconds remaining on that 1967 New Year’s Eve afternoon so frozen in time.

It was a play Kramer himself had suggested, almost sheepishly, to Lombardi after finding a flaw in Dallas’ short-yardage defense during film study 72 hours earlier.

He noticed that while Bob Lilly was so close to the ground ”you couldn’t move him with a D-9 CAT” bulldozer, fellow Cowboys defensive tackle Jethro Pugh stood too high in his stance, making him vulnerable.

”Coach Dallas Goedert Color Rush Jersey ,” Kramer blurted out, ”we can wedge Pugh if we have to.”

Come again?

”We can wedge Pugh if we have to.”

”Run that back,” barked Lombardi.

”So, we run the film back about four different times and he watched Pugh and he said: `That’s right. Put in a wedge on Pugh,”’ Kramer recalled recently as he prepared for his long-awaited Pro Football Hall of Fame induction on Saturday.

Like the star pupil earning brownie points with his teacher, Kramer was proud of his suggestion. But when the Packers were trailing 17-14 with 16 seconds and no timeouts left, he found himself wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.

Starr called his last timeout after halfback Donnie Anderson’s second straight slip, trotted over to the sideline and suggested to Lombardi that he run a sneak because of the poor traction.

”Then run it and let’s get the hell out of here,” Lombardi replied.

Starr called out the play in the huddle.

”31 Wedge.”

Kramer’s heart sank.

It’s one thing to suggest a play. It’s another for it to get called in a do-or-die situation with an NFL championship on the line.

”You really wish they’d call something else maybe,” Kramer recalled. ”Maybe we’d rather run a sweep. Or maybe we ought to run over there.”

Lilly kicked the ice away from the goal line. Pugh pondered calling a timeout to have someone from the Cowboys sideline bring out a shovel.

”The other guys were slipping and sliding because it was icy,” Kramer recalled.

Not him.

”There was an area almost like a golf divot where my left foot went, it was about an inch deep, three-quarters of an inch deep Authentic Welington Castillo Jersey ,” Kramer said. ”And my left foot just snuggled down into that divot and gave me like a starting block.”

Pugh thought Kramer false-started.

Years later, Kramer would admit he moved a split-second before Ken Bowman’s snap, taking some of the heat off Pugh, who died in 2015, and was long blamed by Cowboys fans for the loss in the Ice Bowl.

Kramer hit Pugh first and Bowman spun him around as Starr knifed into the end zone behind them, followed by fullback Chuck Mercein holding his hands high, not to signal touchdown but to show the officials he hadn’t aided his quarterback into the end zone.

CBS had a monitor in the Packers’ locker room afterward and showed Kramer’s block in slow motion, sparking whooping and hollering from his teammates and praise from his coach.

“That’s a fine block,” Lombardi said .

The Cowboys flew home in silence while the Packers prepared for their second Super Bowl, a 33-14 rout of the Raiders in Lombardi’s final game as their head coach.

Pugh would go on to win two Super Bowls with the Cowboys.

Kramer played another season and in 1969 was the only guard voted to the NFL’s 50th Anniversary Team, something he expected would be a prelude to a hasty call from the Hall of Fame.

That invitation finally came this year, making him the 14th member of Lombardi’s Packers to make it into the hall.

At first he was bitter over his repeated snubs, but he grew to accept that he might not ever make it into Canton.

”I’d been through the emotional package that Terrell is going through Niles Paul Jersey ,” Kramer said of fellow 2018 inductee Terrell Owens , who is skipping Saturday’s ceremonies in Canton, Ohio, miffed that he wasn’t a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Kramer can relate.

”I went through a period where I didn’t want to hear about the Hall of Fame,” Kramer said. ”I wanted nothing to do with it. I literally drove by the Hall of Fame three or four times and I wouldn’t go in because I was not invited in.”

Kramer said he eventually found peace by counting his blessings, which included five titles in his 11 seasons as the anchor of Green Bay’s line.

”It just occurred to me that if I was going to be angry over one honor that I didn’t get and trash 100 honors that I did get, that would be stupid,” Kramer said.

At 82, he finally has pro football’s highest honor.

”There was such a range of emotions as deep as you can go into the Earth, and then cloud high,” Kramer said. ”So, it’s been a fascinating journey.”

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