The Hockey News

Things got real in the Liiga, Finland's top professional hockey league, Tuesday night when the Lahti Pelicans took on JYP Jyvaskyla.

During a 5-on-3 advantage created by a pair of game misconducts for JYP, the Pelicans went bananas, scoring four goals in less than two minutes. Three of those goals came in 44 seconds, courtesy of defenseman Juha Leimu, who ripped off a natural hat trick. Watch the footage from Robert Soderlind:

Love that play-by-play, which sounds like Vince McMahon mixed with Mike Lange, and in Finnish. Leimu breaks a 54-year-old league record with his trick, as the previous mark of 50 seconds was set in 1961. And he does it wearing a gold helmet, as leading scorers on every Finnish League team do, which is a friggin' awesome tradition.

How does Leimu's feat measure up to those of NHL greats? Well, if he sniped his trio of goals in exactly half the time it took him on Tuesday, he'd still be a second short of Bill Mosienko's 1952 NHL record of 21 seconds. But Mosienko was a forward, of course. Leimu runs circles around the NHL's defenseman record of 3 minutes and 21 seconds, set by Hall of Famer Denis Potvin in 1978.

Matt Larkin is an associate editor at The Hockey News and a regular contributor to the thn.com Post-To-Post blog. For more great profiles, news and views from the world of hockey, subscribe to The Hockey News magazine. Follow Matt Larkin on Twitter at @THNMattLarkin