MONTREAL — You don’t expect to see history unfold between teams that have been playing against each other for over 100 years, but it happened on Saturday night.
For the first time ever in Montreal, the Toronto Maple Leafs erased a three-goal deficit to beat the Canadiens. They were on their way to getting throttled when Christian Dvorak rang one off the crossbar behind Joseph Woll and started the play that Bobby McMann finished to turn the tide in his team’s favour, and they never looked back.
McMann’s goal, which came 9:32 into the second period, was the first of seven straight the Leafs scored to win 7-3, and it was shocking and bewildering to the Canadiens all at once.
But that’s really all it was to them, and that’s really all it should be to them.
The idea that there’s some sort of big-picture lesson the Canadiens should take from this game feels like a stretch after watching them play more than half of it as well as they had at any other point over the 20 that preceded it. And they played extremely well over the 20 that preceded it, with a 14-5-1 record to show for it.
The Canadiens weren’t good enough over the final 30 minutes of Saturday’s game, though, and it cost them valuable points in the standings and a bruised ego.
But certainly not a broken one.
“I think it’s sometimes good to get a little punch in the teeth and kind of remind us how good every team is in the league,” said Canadiens defenceman Mike Matheson. “While saying that, (we’re) also not losing our confidence or anything like that. I think we can realize that we’ve been playing some really good hockey and know that we just need to get back to that.”
Opportunity knocks in less than 24 hours, with the New York Rangers visiting the Bell Centre for a game on Sunday night.
This one on Saturday was an outlier, even if it partly resembled some of the ones the Canadiens played earlier this season.
We say partly because they’ve had other games that were close until they were anything but in the third period, leaving them on the wrong side of some lopsided scores.
But the Canadiens wilted in those and did anything but against the Leafs, even as the score fell further and further out of reach.
They pressed and pushed and were thwarted by Woll at every turn.
Just as they were when Cole Caufield had a chance to make it 4-0 early in the second period, right before Dvorak smoked one off the pipe and sent McMann barrelling down towards Samuel Montembeault’s net.
The Montreal goaltender was beat by a great shot on that play. He had almost no chance on the high-slot tip Nick Robertson executed to get the Leafs to within one before the second period ended. And then he overplayed the tying goal from William Nylander 24 seconds into the third and missed on the shots from Oliver Ekman Larsson and Auston Matthews that made it 5-3 Leafs.
“I should’ve been better in the third at certain moments to help us keep the lead or keep us in the game,” said Montembeault.
We know he can be, considering his performance since being named to Team Canada’s roster for the upcoming Four Nations Face-Off.
Nick Suzuki’s been on fire since not making that team but was far from his best in Saturday’s game. And while Matheson said there might have been some value in getting punched in the teeth by the Maple Leafs, we doubt Suzuki felt the same way about Matthews’s stick chipping one of his top chiclets in the first period.
We know Lane Hutson didn’t particularly enjoy finishing the night minus-5 after being even or plus in 18 of the 20 games he played before it, but that was just a microcosm of how bizarre this game was for him and his team.
But coach Martin St. Louis didn’t emerge from it worried about the Canadiens, and he appeared anything but concerned for Hutson.
“I’m not worried about Lane,” St. Louis said. “Lane competes. Lane is probably happy we have a game tomorrow so that he can go out and compete again. I think that’s what he’s going to do.”
One would expect the Canadiens to do the same after enabling the Leafs to make history against them Saturday night.
They were frustrated afterwards, but certainly not dispirited.
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