I do my best to avoid pointing to a single circumstance - throughout a competitive 60 minute contest filled with hundreds of consequential decisions, bouncing pucks, and moving parts - in saying "that one thing right there completely changed the game", so I won't do it here either. Specifically in the sports, the butterfly effect is far too real for its wings to be clipped in the process of trying to give a clean and convenient explanation to the otherwise inexplicable sequences of events that play out on an NHL ice surface come late April and on. All that being said, I'm also not going to sit here and pretend that the goddamn hockey gods can't be a blasphemous bunch of sadists. The fact that the argument can even be made that Kevin Hayes, during his most productive game as a member of the Winnipeg Jets...
...went on to counterproductively change the entire outlook of the series by accidentally going full-on Robin Hood in stealing a sure goal from himself only to gift just a little bit of life to a Blues' team that could have potentially been buried by it is absolutely insane. Again, it's impossible to know what would have gone on to happen had his stick grazed that puck on its way towards the net as opposed to its way back, but coming back from down three goals in a raucous arena on the road is undeniably more difficult than doing so from two goals down. You can bet your ass that fact wasn't lost Kevin Hayes as that replay ran through his head on repeat and he tossed and turned his way to shitty slumber last night. After all, playoff hockey being so preposterously unpredictable doesn't cause any emotional detachment to the thrilling and/or deflating effect of deflections that, in certain situations, might as well be destiny defining dice rolls.
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