The firsts came in a flood and a fashion that was nothing short of ridiculous, ridiculous in the best sense of that word for the Utah Mammoth.

In their first-ever NHL playoff home game on Friday night, they poured it on the visiting Vegas Golden Knights, scoring that game’s first four goals en route to a lopsided victory. It was a first NHL playoff win ever in the Delta Center. A first win that earned the Mammoth a 2-1 lead in their first-round Stanley Cup playoff series. And the first crowd to ever witness a Utah NHL playoff game went absolutely wild.

That’s six firsts, for those counting, in one game, one paragraph. And that was just fine, an emotional first, for the men in black.

Describing what happened on the Delta Center ice goes like this: Vegas came out in a fury over the game’s first fistful of minutes, with Mammoth goaltender Karel Vejmelka stoning everything that came his way. And as he did so, his teammates took that vibe straight back at the Golden Knights, repeatedly rushing up the ice and making Vegas pay. Lawson Crouse got two goals, Dylan Guenther rocketed a shot past Knights goaltender Carter Hart, who was also bested earlier by MacKenzie Weegar on a shot that blasted Hart in his mask, appearing to stun him, the puck dropping down and backward into the net.

It was a stretch that may well have been one of the best of the season for the Mammoth, their timing near-perfect for a team still feeling its way through an NHL postseason. The fact that it came against an opponent that doubled up the Mammoth in playoff experience made it that much more impressive.

There were physical moments, too, the bigger Golden Knights continuing their effort from the initial two games to intimidate the younger Mammoth players. It didn’t work.

Another first for Utah was the emergence of its line of Clayton Keller, Nick Schmaltz, and Crouse, which found a way to rise up in this series, a series that was and still is bound to require that line to successfully do its business, alongside other scoring stars like Guenther and Logan Cooley.

After the Golden Knights got their initial goal near the end of the second period, the Mammoth showed confidence and composure from the start of the third period through to game’s end.

The Golden Knights had a power-play chance midway through the third, compliments of some cross-checking and roughing on the part of the Mammoth, roughing that was interpreted by the home crowd as its team standing its own ground.

Stand and withstand the Mammoth did.

Another power play emerged later on an interference call, leading to a second Vegas goal. Not long thereafter, the Golden Knights pulled their tender to see if an extra skater would cut the 4-2 lead.

It wouldn’t, it didn’t.

The fans went berserk, waving their towels, yelling their guts out, losing themselves in the feeling-of-the-first hockey celebration, taking in the playoff win. The response was thunderous in a building that hadn’t experienced that kind, any kind, of playoff pandemonium in a long, long time. The noise caroming off the walls and ceiling of the grand-and-once-proud building seemed to awaken ghosts of postseasons past of a whole different sport.

“Amazing,” Crouse said into a camera afterward. “Look at this place right now. It’s amazing.”

He added: “We’re just doing whatever we can to win hockey games.”

Work obviously remains for Utah in this series, and while the competitive tone-and-tenor thus far has remained the same, there seems to be growing respect on the part of Vegas for the postseason’s new guys. When veteran Nic Dowd informed 21-year-old Cooley that he was going to “kill him” after the Golden Knights won Game 1, an instance of utter disrespect aimed at the youngster in particular and his ‘mates in general, in the wake now of the second and third games, a measure of respect is growing, should be growing, inside Vegas for the Mammoth.

It’s a mystery what will come next. Game 4 is back at the Delta Center on Monday night. Where the series goes from here, nobody knows. As it is, moving forward, the Mammoth want more than respect. They want wins. They want the crowd of the present and the ghosts of the past to roar.