Check your furnace filter ma’am?

We didn’t have any heating problems, but it was a good idea to up and change the furnace filter today, as you can see…

So I moved a bunch of Teresa’s junk out of the way and took the lower panel off of our gas furnace. After figuring out the airflow direction, I put a new filter in…

Unfortunately, as usual the filter got a bit bent when I was shoving the filter into it’s allocated space. Is there a trick to this?

We have a gas furnace, one time I somehow managed to extinguish the pilot light. There should be instructions to restart it near the shutoff switch inside the upper section.