Sweden finally beat Canada at the world ice hockey championship but there was no gold medal at stake on Saturday.
Defenseman Kenny Jonsson scored the game-winner at 13:47 in the third period as Sweden, which lost the last two finals to Canada, rallied from 2-0 and 3-1 deficits to win 5-4.
Samuel Pahlsson set up the game-winner with a nice pass, and Jonsson one-timed a shot past Martin Brodeur.
"I was lucky with the bounce when I got the puck ... then I shot," Jonsson said.
Mattias Norstrom, the Los Angeles Kings defenseman and captain, also got an assist.
With its fourth straight tournament win, Sweden moved atop Group F with six points to close in on a quarterfinal berth next week.
So did the Czech Republic, which beat Slovakia 5-1 in Group E at Vienna for its fourth straight win.
However, two of its points from the preliminaries don't count in the second round.
Canada, 3-0 in the prelims, kept second place in Group F with four points, one ahead of the United States and Finland. The top four teams in each group advance to the quarters.
Jonsson also set up two important goals in the second period -- Pahlsson cutting the score to 3-2 and Mikael Samuelsson's tally that made it 3-3.
Jonsson started in the tournament opener against Ukraine, and left the second game against Denmark in the first period when he became ill.
"I spent two days in bed," Jonsson said. "I was probably more rested than the others.''
Pahlsson, Samuelsson and Henrik Zetterberg scored three unanswered goals for the Swedes in the second period. Daniel Sedin also scored for Sweden late in the first session.
Rick Nash, the tournament's leading scorer with seven goals, made it 4-4 early in the third before Jonsson put the Swedes ahead for good.
Shane Doan, Joe Thornton and Dany Heatley also scored for Canada.
Sweden next plays the US today.
"It's going to be fun playing the Americans," said Zetterberg, one of the Detroit Red Wings' new stars. "I think the Americans played better for two periods against Canada the other night. It's going to be a tough game, but we'll be able to recharge."
Petr Sykora, Martin Straka, Tomas Kaberle, Ales Hemsky and Pavel Kubina scored for the Czechs in Vienna. It was the Czechs' seventh win in nine world championship games against its neighbor. Martin Strbak scored the only goal for Slovakia.
The Czechs lead Group E with six points, one ahead of Russia. Switzerland and Slovakia each have three points.
Jaromir Jagr, playing with a broken finger, had two assists for the Czechs.
"It was tough, but we won and that also eases the pain," said Jagr, a five-time NHL scoring champion.
From the start the Czechs skated better, checked harder, and shot more precisely.
Earlier, Latvia shut out Ukraine 3-0, and Belarus blanked Kazakhstan 2-0 in their second-round openers.
Leonids Tambijevs, Karlis Skrastins and Aleksandrs Semjonovs scored for Latvia, while goalie Arturs Irbe faced only 17 shots for his first shutout in the tournament.
Latvia has two points and is fifth in Group F while Ukraine is last with zero points. The small Baltic nation, which plays Finland next, reached the quarterfinals for the first and only time in 2000.
In Vienna, goalie Andrei Mezin posted his second shutout in the tournament, making 37 saves for Belarus.
Sergei Erkovich notched the game-winner with a power-play goal midway through the second period.
Kazakhstan head coach Nikolay Myshagin pulled goalie Vitaliy Kolesnik twice and called a time-out in the final minute. Konstantin Koltsov added an empty-netter with two seconds left.
Belarus has two points and is next-to-last in Group E.
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