TAMPA — The puck was already by him. Nothing he could do about that.

But the blade? The stupid blade responsible for paving the way for the puck? The blade that came off his left skate and left him sliding around the ice looking, well, looking exactly the way you would expect a goaltender without a skate blade would look?

That, Tuukka Rask could reach.

So there he was late in the second period of Game 1 of this second-round playoff series against Tampa Bay Saturday, tossing his blocker and his stick aside, plucking the offending blade from its resting place in front of his crease, brandishing it in his right hand like a courtroom gavel, waving it in frustration to the referees who’d missed his earlier plea for help, and ultimately, flinging it back to the ice in frustration.

There was nothing Rask could do to take the goal off the board, no rule-abiding way to go back in time and get the whistle he’d been yelling to officials for more than 10 seconds to blow, no recourse for the bizarre sequence that allowed the Lightning to cut their deficit to one and threatened to unravel all the good Boston had done across nearly two full periods of hockey.

But that didn’t mean the veteran Bruins goalie didn’t have an answer for the craziness.

In doubling down on a lockdown start and playing even better from that point on, Rask was the backbone of Saturday’s 6-2 Bruins win, the anchor to a potentially series-altering opening road victory, the glue in a situation that could have so easily dissolved into chaos, had he allowed it to dent his composure.

“Today he, how I say, he was standing on his head and making great saves,’’ forward David Pastrnak said. “That was the only way they got to him. So I wasn’t worrying about him coming back after getting mad.’’

From the moment the puck dropped in Amalie Arena, Rask was nearly impenetrable, the only one in Black and Gold seemingly not on his heels, stealing some much-needed time for his on-ice colleagues to shed the hangover of last week’s dramatic Game 7 win over Toronto. For all the impressive stats that came from the Bruins’ top line — two goals and an assist from Patrice Bergeron, a goal and three assists from Brad Marchand, four assists from Pastrnak — none of it might have mattered had Rask not been there to weather an early 8-10-minute Tampa onslaught.

But once the Bruins started scoring, there was no way Rask was going to let it go to waste. Other than a long, screened shot by Dan Girardi that cut a 2-0 lead in half and that skate-assisted Mikhail Sergachev goal at 13:22 of the second period that cut the lead to 3-2, Rask was brilliant, making 34 saves.

“He outplayed their guy. That’s the way I look at it. Plain and simple. He was better than their guy,’’ Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy said, high praise from the man who’d pulled Rask from Game 5 of the Toronto series. “You want that every night. You’re not going to get that every night. It’s two good goaltenders.’’

But only one who was forced to endure 10 to 15 seconds without a skate blade, only one whose situation seemed to cause arena-wide confusion. Until the NHL’s public relations account tweeted out an explanation (“There is no rule for referees to stop play for a broken piece of equipment, regardless of whether the equipment belongs to a goaltender or a skater’’), there was plenty of confusion about the seemingly common-sense aspect of the need for a break.

Rask said officials later told him had they heard him yelling, they would have blown the whistle. Cassidy said he’s seen many situations (including one in his team’s series against Toronto) when play was stopped unexpectedly. Fellow players just saw their all-important goaltender flailing on the ice.

“I didn’t know the rule there, to be honest,’’ Pastrnak said. “He’s sitting on his [rear] there, he can’t move, he tried. I don’t know if you ever tried to move with no blade, I don’t know if I could be there and sitting on my [rear] taking hard shots. It’s pretty slippery, I’m telling you, and you can pull your groin easily on that. I think it should be blown, but I don’t know what the rule is.’’

“To me, it’s a play that could result in a bad injury,’’ echoed defenseman Zdeno Chara. “It’s something that should be considered as an automatic whistle because it’s a safety issue first. You have a sharp knife blade on the ice that anyone can fall on and do a big cut. Second of all, you have a player without the steel that is very much in a weak position to maybe run into the boards or collide with an opposition player or his own teammate.’’

It was Chara who was there to help guide his wobbly teammate to the bench for some emergency repair work, Chara fulfilling his captain’s duties in yet another quiet but important way, separating the often-emotional Rask from doing something he might regret. That Rask had already gotten away with throwing that sharp steel blade across the ice wasn’t lost on some.

“I wasn’t sure he should have thrown that skate blade,’’ Bergeron said. “I was thinking, ‘No, don’t do that.’ At least no one was around . . . It was nice to see that emotion out of him and the way he’s stepped up his game. It definitely gives us a lot of confidence.’’

Explained Rask: “I didn’t throw it at anybody. If I threw it at somebody I’d like to apologize. I just wanted to make sure that everybody saw that my blade was off.’’

The whole hockey world saw it. But what they also saw was a goaltender take that heat-of-the-moment energy and pour it into his play rather than his anger, and, at least for this day, silence the endless doubters wondering if he’ll ever be good enough to win a Stanley Cup. From the opening minutes of dominance to the later display of resilience, he was as much the reason for victory Saturday as anyone on the Bruins’ roster.

“I don’t think he played better because he was dialed in from the first shift on,’’ Bergeron said. “When you see emotions like that, he was getting pretty rattled that the puck went in, that’s a pretty good indication he wants it. It gives us great energy on the bench and you want it, too.’’

Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Globe_Tara.