Penguins’ Louis Domingue Is a Backup Turned NHL Playoffs Star

His first foray into cooking entailed dumping a wad of uncooked spaghetti into cold water and watching it turn to cement. But he did learn, and eventually wrote a cookbook, “Baking Goals,” which is focused on home baking and offers the family recipes he learned from Boileau and her mother. The proceeds benefit autism research, Boileau said.

Domingue got a late start at goalie. He was 8, his father said, when he began at the position, which is over the hill for many aspiring Quebec netminders. But the family spent their summers in Gloucester, Mass., a seaside town with a strong arts community, instead of watching Louis in goalie lessons in rinks around Quebec. Boileau is an art teacher, and Charles Domingue, in addition to being a filmmaker, was an excellent goalie in school. He helped Louis learn to play, and to love, the position, shuttling his son to early-morning practices and taking him on road trips near and far.

“It’s not easy for the parents of the goalies,” Charles Domingue said. “There is so much pressure on them. I would watch other fathers, and they are drinking beer, buying T-shirts, having fun. The father of the goalie, it’s not the same. One mistake, and everyone is upset.”

Louis was also a terrific baseball player, but when he was around 14, he made the decision to focus on hockey, and he powered through the junior ranks as a prospect. His favorite player, perhaps appropriately, was not the Canadiens’ star goalie, José Théodore, but Jeff Hackett, their backup.

Domingue was selected by the Coyotes in the fifth round of the 2010 draft, but for the next several years he bounced between the A.H.L. and the N.H.L., playing for six teams, passing through waivers several times. But he refused to give up.

“You know, he loves cats,” his mother said. “And he has nine lives.”

Playing for Tampa Bay in 2019, Domingue set the team record for most consecutive wins by a goalie, with 11, but the Lightning had Andrei Vasilevskiy, one of the best goalies in the world, and Domingue was waived the next September. He has played on four teams since.