You never want an excited pilot during an "incident". Excited pilots make mistakes. Only when you are safely back on the ground it is okay for the pilot to get excited!
I have had the misfortune(?) of being on several "exciting" flights (the first when I was about 10 years old and the plane caught fire) and I am happy to say in all of them the pilot was icy calm throughout. There is an old saying that "nothing focuses the mind like the thought your hanging in the morning." But from personal experience, an engine fire in a single engine aircraft when you are the pilot in command (the only pilot on the aircraft in fact) over the Mojave desert during a windstorm has GOT to be a close second.
