The Philadelphia Flyers' Travis Sanheim, right, celebrates with Porter Martone after scoring during the third period of Game 1 in the first round of the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs against the Penguins in Pittsburgh on Saturday. (AP photo)

PITTSBURGH — So much for the Philadelphia Flyers being too inexperienced for all this. Too young for that matter.

Whatever concerns Philadelphia might have had about its young core evaporated over 60 minutes of confident, assured hockey in a 3-2 victory over Pittsburgh in Game 1 of their first-round series on Saturday night.

Jamie Drysdale, just 24 and one of 10 Flyers players making his postseason debut, spent part of the first period mixing it up with Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, then gave the Flyers the lead midway through the second with a shot that found its way through a perfectly set screen by 20-year-old Denver Barkey.

Porter Martone, 19, provided the game winner late in the third with a wrist shot from the right circle, capping a dazzling sequence in which he hit the brakes and spun around to create a shooting lane in front of Pittsburgh’s Noel Acciari.

“I kind of stopped up and shot it and luckily it went in,” Martone said in typically understated fashion.

Despite playing in just the 10th game of his NHL career, Martone could sense the vibe shift from the regular season to the playoffs. The sea of yellow towel-waving Penguin fans that greeted the Flyers with boos when they came out for pregame warmups offered tangible proof. So did the intensity of the opening period, when the curiosity of the cross-state rivals’ first postseason meeting in eight years quickly gave way to animosity.

Philadelphia stood its ground, often dictating the terms against the Penguins, who have undergone a retooling of their own but still go as the core of Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and Erik Karlsson — who came in with a combined 573 career playoff games — go.

While Malkin had a goal and an assist, Crosby was unusually quiet, and Letang and Karlsson were part of a Pittsburgh defense that appeared caught off guard by Philadelphia’s speed.

Karlsson is confident that first-year coach Dan Muse and the rest of the Penguins coaching staff will have more answers for tonight’s Game 2.

Muse didn’t think there was anything surprising about the way the Flyers counterattacked. Perhaps the thing that did catch the Penguins off guard was the way Philadelphia’s playoff neophytes hardly seemed intimidated.

Then again, it’s been that way for most of the last two months for the Flyers, who stormed into the postseason behind a scorching finishing stretch fueled by young legs that don’t know any better.

The Flyers are playing with house money in a sense. They’re one of the longest shots in the 16-team field to end a Stanley Cup drought that’s a half-century old. Not that it matters at the moment. They hardly looked burdened by history in the opener.

No one outside of their dressing room expected them to be here when they were in 13th place in the Eastern Conference coming out of the Milan Cortina Olympic break, a point in time when Martone was finishing up his only season at Michigan State.

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AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl