from Helene St. James of the Detroit Free Press,

The Detroit Red Wings earned themselves relief, earned a reward.

The winning feeling they take into the All-Star/bye week break gratified a group low on confidence after one good performance after another ended in a loss. The Wings are headed for a third straight playoff miss, but at least they headed out of Edmonton with a victory.

“I feel like we deserved a better fate on this trip, but that’s the way hockey goes some times,” Jimmy Howard said after Tuesday’s 3-2 final at Rogers Place. “It was nice to get two points here and go into the break feeling good about ourselves.”....

“The most satisfying thing is that we’ve stayed with it,” he said. “It would have been easy to feel sorry for ourselves after playing pretty darn good hockey and losing, and yet we started this game the way we have the last number of games. We played very, very good hockey for two periods, our pressure was good. We had the better of the play for two periods. Good for us for that.

“We found a way to end up with playing good and winning. We’ve talked about that, it was certainly not satisfying to play good and lose, you have to find a way to play good and win. We were able to do that. You’d have hated to play good again and not win. It certainly feels good going into the break with a win.”

read on

added 10:23am, The road trip is coming to an end.