One of the coolest things about sports is that even when things feel bleak, your team is never truly out of it until the final whistle blows.
From the Patriots’ 28-3 comeback in Super Bowl LI to the Red Sox coming back from the brink of death in the 2004 ALCS, we’ve learned as sports fans that there’s almost no such thing as a “safe lead.”
With all that being said, some leads really are too big to choke away, and even the most optimistic fans can discern when it’s time to throw in the towel and head for the exits.
A football team up by 35 points with a minute and a half to go in the game certainly isn’t squandering away the win, and there are plenty of other examples of leads that are virtually insurmountable.
Hockey fans thought they had an idea of what that number was for pretty much the entire history of the sport until last night, when the Montreal Canadiens were absolutely bending the visiting Winnipeg Jets over a barrel at the Bell Centre.
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The Habs had a 4-0 lead with less than three minutes to go in the third period.
Read that sentence again, and then try to wrap your head around any team blowing a lead like that.
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You don’t need to imagine it, though, as the Montreal faithful had to witness firsthand what is now the biggest collapse in NHL history.
I saw some of the hockey accounts I follow on X last night making vague allusions to an “epic collapse” happening in Montreal, but between putting my son to bed and trying to stay off social media to avoid the “post-midterm doom scroll,” I figured I’d just go to sleep and see what the fuss was about in the morning.
In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine this was what they were talking about.
Blowing a four-goal lead with three minutes left in the game is unfathomable.
Hollywood would have lit your script on fire and then pissed on the ashes if you handed them an ending like that.
For crying out loud, the minute that first goal for the Jets got home, Montreal should have just dumped the puck in Winnipeg’s zone and parked the bus.
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It’s three minutes!
You can waste about 20 seconds at a time just pinning the puck against the boards. How does this happen?
The game even went to overtime, so the Habs still had a chance to right the ship and avoid history, but that apparently wasn’t in the cards either.
It’s a regular season NHL game in November, which normally means everyone will forget it ever happened two days later.
99.9% of the time, that would be the case, but no hockey fan will ever forget about this one.