RALEIGH, N.C. — Immediately after his team had finished laying an egg, or something like it, in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final, Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour talked about the need to “toss” the result.The next day, winger Taylor Hall called the Montreal Canadiens’ 6-2 win one to “flush.”On Sunday night, in the moments that followed a 3-2, series-evening win in Game 2 — one that was fully in character for the Hurricanes, right down to a final score that didn’t quite reflect the degree of their dominance — Brind’Amour brought the analogies out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen.At the instant Nikolaj Ehlers scored in overtime, displaying the exact sort of game-breaking talent that made him and the Hurricanes an almost too-obvious match last summer, Brind’Amour’s short-term job was done. Game 1, whether in the toilet or the trash can, is as close as it can be to being forgotten.Now, after the Hurricanes’ first home conference final win since 2006, they’re playing a best-of-five that begins in Montreal on Monday night. The reset button has been pushed.“We’re happy that, at least, we can start the series over,” Brind’Amour said. “Nothing’s really been accomplished, other than kinda trashing that first game. Now we got to really start the series, is the way we have to look at it. The good news is, I think we feel (like), ‘OK, we know what we need to do.’ And we got to it tonight.”Before the Hurricanes moved on, though, they had to identify the 12-minute virus that led to a disastrous stretch at the start of Game 1 — a series of events that, to hear them say it, effectively made the following two-and-a-half periods elementary. Five breakaways were surprising. Four goals were shocking. The play of Jaccob Slavin, a guy whose name is semi-regularly preceded by “best defensive defenseman on Earth,” was borderline baffling.None of this is meant to overstate Game 2’s importance. It wasn’t a mountain to climb. It wasn’t their first taste of true adversity, either; to label it as such would be to understate the way the Ottawa Senators played them in the first round and overstate the big-picture importance of an early series loss.We’re also not going to get into a full-freight rehash of Slavin’s Game 1 catastrophe. That’s already been done. What we will do is point out that in the 18 minutes, 12 seconds Slavin spent on the ice at five-on-five in Game 2, largely alongside partner Jalen Chatfield, Carolina outscored the Canadiens 3-0, out-attempted them 21-12, outshot them 11-3, won high-danger chances 6-1 and controlled a mammoth 80 percent of the expected goals.The vast majority of those minutes came against Montreal’s top line of Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovský. They, along with the rest of the Canadiens who matched up with Slavin and Chatfield, didn’t do much and didn’t score at all. The Hurricanes, meanwhile, scored all three of their goals, including Ehlers’ electrifying game-winner, which started when Chatfield banked the puck off the boards in the neutral-zone to Mark Jankowski, who immediately pushed it to Ehlers, already in fifth gear.Slavin? He was back to his old self. The perfect gap-control decisions, the usage of his stick as a fifth limb, his puck retrievals, his board work — 48 hours after it all vanished, randomly and briefly, there it was again.“That’s hopefully how it should look most nights, unlike Game 1,” Slavin said. “(Suzuki, Caufield and Slafkovský) are a great line. They have a lot of skill. And you have to respect that. But it’s taking away their time and space and being hard to play against. And we did a good job at that tonight.”Confused as Brind’Amour seemed after Game 1, he was firm in the belief, rooted in their eight years’ worth of track record together, that Slavin would get the car back on the road. Game 2 proved Brind’Amour right.“(Slavin is) the best athlete I’ve ever seen at being able to just turn the page. He also showed that he was human the other night, to be honest. He had a game where I was like, ‘I hadn’t seen that in … ever,’” Brind’Amour.“He’s got a strong belief of what it’s all about. And he bounced back.”The rest of the Hurricanes did, too. Game 1’s video post-mortem brought one particular focal point, Brind’Amour said, that he was not interested in sharing. Worth noting, though, is that Carolina’s aggression was still present, but a bit less reckless. Neither the forwards nor the defensemen were getting caught too far into the attacking zone, which both helped prevent breakaways before they began and threw blankets on them before they turned into five-alarm fires.Now, is the whole deal repeatable? One would think so; what we witnessed on Saturday, largely, was 63 minutes, 29 seconds of Hurricanes Hockey™ as we’ve come to know it. They played differently than they did in Game 1, sure, but also directly in line with the identity they’ve carved out, honed and tweaked under Brind’Amour since he took over as coach in 2018-19.Whether that identity is enough to win a Stanley Cup, or more than one game in a conference final, remains an open question. The Hurricanes believe both that it will be, and that it has been; the Florida Panthers, in plenty of ways, beat Carolina at its own game in last year’s Eastern final, using a deeper well of elite talent and a better goaltending performance to end that series in five games.Carolina, as of Saturday night, is guaranteed at least that long a series against Montreal, a step closer to the big-picture result that they’ve spent the last five years chasing down. Were they a bounce away from a much more precarious spot? Certainly. Results are results, though, and on Sunday night, they earned one worth holding onto for a bit.