OTTAWA Adidas Carter Rowney Jersey , Ontario (AP) With their own playoff hopes long gone, the Ottawa Senators are taking great satisfaction in making life harder for those still fighting for a spot.Mike Hoffman scored his 22nd goal at 3:26 of overtime and the Senators beat the Dallas Stars 3-2 on Friday night to win their third game in a row for just the second time this season.Marian Gaborik and Matt Duchene also scored for the Senators (26-33-11), and Craig Anderson made 23 saves. Ottawa won on home ice for the first time since Feb. 17.”We’re showing what kind of team we really are in here,” Duchene said. ”It’s too bad it’s so late in the season and we couldn’t have done this a little earlier, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. We want to go into the summer on a high note and we’re on our way.”Tyler Seguin and Tyler Pitlick had the goals for the Stars (38-26-8). Ben Bishop, who stopped 22 shots, made his first start since missing five games with a knee injury sustained March 5 against the Senators. Bishop has a 9-0-4 career record against Ottawa.Dallas, in the thick of a crowded playoff race, has lost four straight for its longest skid of the season.”It’s very disappointing,” Pitlick said. ”Every point is important right now.”Stars coach Ken Hitchcock chose to look at the one point his team earned in a more favorable light.”This is a great point,” he said. ”To come back and we’ve got nothing left in the tank and we keep pushing, this is a good point. The (6-5 overtime loss on Wednesday) in Toronto was tough, it’s really tough, but this is a great point. Ottawa has a lot of skill and a lot of speed and they put us to the test and to come back and get a point in this game after we almost gave it away is good. We move on.”The Stars did themselves no favors in the third.The Senators started the period on a power play and were able to take advantage as Gaborik scored his 10th of the season on a one-timer off some solid work from Thomas Chabot and Ryan Dzingel to tie it at 1.”We’ve done a good job staying strong mentally,” Ottawa coach Guy Boucher said. ”We don’t score the first goal and we’re still winning the game – we’ve had a few of those lately and I think our players are looking really good. But I’ve been saying it for a long time and now we’re getting some results.”The Stars didn’t register their first shot until the 16th minute of the period Adidas Jaycob Megna Jersey , shortly after the Senators took a 2-1 lead on Duchene’s goal.Duchene took the puck on his backhand, moved it to his forehand and beat Bishop high from in close. Just more than a minute later, the Stars tied it 2-all as Pitlick put the puck past Anderson.Neither team seemed to be able to get much going in the second.Jean-Gabriel Pageau had a great chance but rang a shot off the post, and the Stars hit one at the other end.Mark Borowiecki took an elbow to the mouth midway through the game and went to the dressing room, but was able to return.Pitlick took a late double-minor for high sticking Senators defenseman Ben Harpur with just under a minute left in the second to set up Ottawa for a three-minute man advantage to open the third.The Stars opened the scoring midway through the first on the power play as some good passing led to Jamie Benn feeding Seguin for a one-timer and his 38th goal of the season, a career high.The Senators had their chances but hit the post three times, twice on the same power play.Benn had a strange moment late in the game when he fell on Erik Karlsson’s stick and wouldn’t let it go and then took it to the Stars’ bench. He later asked Karlsson if he could have it, and the Senators’ captain gladly gave it up.”I’ll gladly give a good player that stick,” said Karlsson, who acknowledged he’d never had anyone ask him for a stick during a game before.NOTES: Ottawa’s Mark Stone missed his third straight game with a leg injury. … Stars D Marc Methot sat out his second consecutive game with a hand injury. The former Senator and Ottawa native was set to play his first game against the team since being selected in the expansion draft by the Vegas Golden Knights and later traded to Dallas.UP NEXTStars: At the Winnipeg Jets on Sunday night.Senators: At the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday night.— John Tavares isn’t the only free agent going back to a familiar place.Several players are returning to their former teams and comfortable situations – from James van Riemsdyk going back to Philadelphia on the second-richest July 1 deal to Matt Cullen taking a significant pay cut to rejoin the Pittsburgh Penguins he helped win the Stanley Cup twice. It’s not quite the tug at the heartstrings that led Tavares to sign a $77 million, seven-year deal with his boyhood Toronto Maple Leafs, but familiarity was part of the bustle on the opening day of NHL free agency .”I have that comfortablity with knowing a lot about the organization having played there in the past and having a lot of familiar faces still on the staff and stuff like that,” van Riemsdyk said after signing a $35 million, five-year deal with the Flyers. ”Even just remembering to my time previously is just how bad obviously they want to win and they’re willing to put the resources into that. That passion and that commitment to that was a big thing for me.”Unsure there’d be room for him after his old team re-signed Riley Sheahan, Cullen signed a $650 Adidas Max Jones Jersey ,000, one-year deal with the Penguins after spending a season back home in Minnesota. Tomas Plekanec was away from Montreal for only a few months, signing a bonus-laden $2.25 million, one-year deal with the Canadiens after they traded him to the rival Maple Leafs at the deadline.Plekanec had planned since the end of the season to go back to Montreal, where his family remained when he went to Toronto. He will be back at the Bell Centre on a contract that can be worth another $1.25 million in incentives. The 35-year-old will get to play his 1,000th career regular-season game in his familiar blue, white and red uniform this October.”That was my priority,” Plekanec said. ”I wanted to come back.”While Plekanec obviously felt a strong connection to Montreal after 14 seasons there, David Perron will be playing for the St. Louis Blues for the third time in his NHL career after signing for $16 million over four years. Perron spent his first six seasons with the Blues after they took him in the first round in 2007, returned as a free agent two summers ago, was taken by the Golden Knights in the expansion draft a year ago and is back again after setting career highs with 50 assists and 66 points in Las Vegas.”Obviously (the Golden Knights) made the right decision with the way that David played for them,” Blues general manager Doug Armstrong said. ”He certainly could’ve made more money on the market. He wanted to come back.”Thomas Vanek enjoyed his 48 games with the Detroit Red Wings in 2016-17 so much he wanted to sign with them last July but they didn’t have enough salary-cap space. When the opportunity presented itself this time, the 34-year-old winger zeroed in on a one-year deal and chose Detroit’s $3 million offer over a few other options.”I loved it there,” Vanek said. ”It was a good it. I really liked the whole culture of the organization and the guys were great. We tried to make it work last year. It didn’t work out, so I’m happy it did this year.”No one says hockey players can’t go home Adidas Andrej Sustr Jersey , but there has to be mutual interest. It was simple for the Penguins, who lacked something without Cullen in their second-round loss to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Washington Capitals. Pittsburgh had tried to reacquire the 41-year-old center at the trade deadline.It was a bit more complicated for the Flyers, who traded van Riemsdyk to Toronto in 2012 in a one-for-one deal for bruising defenseman Luke Schenn. That was under a previous regime that believed the 6-foot-3, 217-pound left winger wasn’t tough enough, but GM Ron Hextall sees a player who checks the boxes for a playoff contender with a few holes.”We felt with the fit that we needed some size,” Hextall said. ”We needed goal-scoring. We need a left winger. This one just fit all around for us and I think James felt the same way.”The personality fit was there, too, because Flyers management knew van Riemsdyk, who is 29. Coming through Philadelphia’s system as the second overall pick in 2007 helped with Hextall being willing to make his biggest free agent splash.”We know the person – people inside this organization – (and) obviously that helps,” Hextall said.Van Riemsdyk did his homework by talking with captain Claude Giroux, winger Jakub Voracek and recent Flyers players before choosing to return to his first NHL organization. He also fondly remembered the Flyers’ run to the Cup Final in 2010.”Hopefully again we get a chance to do something like that in the future,” he said.—