WINNIPEG — Only one outcome could have made the St. Louis Blues feel the pain they did Sunday.

And it happened.

They could have lost Game 7 to the Winnipeg Jets by five goals. The immediate reaction to the end of the 2024-25 season would’ve been disappointing, but understandable.

The Jets were the NHL’s best team in the regular season, hosting the winner-take-all game in a series in which the home team had won all six games up to that point.

Jim Montgomery’s club could take the experience gained from its Western Conference first-round series back to St. Louis and know that the retool had been expedited exponentially.

That may well still be the case in the end.

However, long after the NHL careers of rookies Jimmy Snuggerud and Zack Bolduc are over, fans will still remember the year the Blues led Game 7 against the Jets by two goals with less than two minutes to play in regulation and, beyond unfathomably, fell 4-3 in double overtime.

And that it happened because of an area of their game that was an Achilles’ heel all season — six-on-five — won’t be forgotten anytime soon, either.

With Winnipeg goaltender Connor Hellebuyck pulled for an extra attacker and the Blues clinging to a 3-1 lead, the Jets’ Vladislav Namestnikov scored with 1:56 remaining in regulation and Cole Perfetti capped off a sequence of perfection to tie the score with 2.2 seconds left.

If Blues fans were pessimistic about the team’s chances of recovering from that, those feelings proved accurate, as Jets captain Adam Lowry deflected in the series-clinching goal with 3:50 left in double OT.

Lowry’s goal will go down as the official game winner, but Perfetti’s goal will be remembered right up there with Steve Yzerman’s double-OT goal to lift the Detroit Red Wings to a 1-0 win over the Blues in the 1996 conference semifinals. Perhaps not quite to that level because of the Blues’ Stanley Cup aspirations that season with Brett Hull and Wayne Gretzky on the roster, but just as torturous.

“A second and a half away from closing out the series … it’s brutal,” Blues captain Brayden Schenn said.

Instead of packing up and preparing to play the Dallas Stars in the Western Conference semifinals, the Blues will be thinking ‘what if? for a long time to come.

“I’ve had a few painful ones,” Montgomery said. “I’ve had overtime Game 7 losses. Anytime your season ends, it’s painful.”

But not as painful as giving up the latest game-tying goal in a Game 7 in NHL history, eclipsing the previous record of six seconds set by the Vancouver Canucks’ Matt Cooke in 2004. And, along with the Namestnikov goal, having it come six-on-five.

The Blues had a league-leading 13 goals against with the opponent’s goalie pulled for an extra attacker in the regular season.

Well, they can add two more to that total after Sunday.

After defenseman Colton Parayko flipped the puck into the offensive zone for an icing with 3:14 left, Winnipeg called a timeout and pulled Hellebuyck.

Blues forward Robert Thomas had an empty net attempt with 2:55 left, but missed wide left.

There was another icing by Blues defenseman Justin Faulk with 2:28 left, bringing a faceoff back into the Blues’ zone. After Lowry beat Oskar Sundqvist on the draw, the Jets kept the puck in the zone for the next 35 seconds, and Namestnikov scored on a shot that deflected in off Schenn’s stick with 1:55 to play.

THE WINNIPEG JETS ARE WITHIN ONE! 😱

With Winnipeg trimming the deficit to 3-2, Hellebuyck went back in the net, but left again with 1:26 remaining.

The Jets came close to tying the score with 1:06 left, but Binnington kept out a puck that was centimeters from crossing the goal line. It was ruled no goal on the ice and held up after a review.

There was a faceoff in the Blues’ defensive zone, and Thomas iced the puck again with 53 seconds left. There was another faceoff and Pavel Buchnevich shot at the empty net, resulting in another icing with 46 seconds left.

The Blues got a clear, but the Jets brought the puck back into the offensive zone with 23 seconds left, and after clearing attempts by Faulk and Parayko, the puck wound up in the corner with 12 seconds to play.

It came out to the point to Nikolaj Ehlers, who whiffed on a shot, but Lowry sent it back out to him. With about three seconds left, instead of taking another desperation shot, Ehlers made a cross-ice pass to Kyle Connor, who fed the puck in front to Perfetti for a deflection past Blues goalie Jordan Binnington.

Game tied, 3-3.

WITH 1.6 SECONDS TO GO. 🤯

It was certainly a heads-up play by Ehlers.

“He’s a smart player,” Parayko said. “He must have saw it there.”

Montgomery noted that when Connor got the puck from Ehlers, he whiffed on the shot.

“It went right to a guy (Perfetti) in the slot,” Montgomery said.

Even so, it was yet another six-on-five goal against.

What gives?

“I don’t know,” Parayko said. “I wish I had the right answer. When we’re good six-on-five, we’re at the net front. We’re pushing out fast, making it hard on them to make plays. But I don’t know.”

Schenn, who was on the ice for both six-on-five goals Sunday, didn’t want to get into the details.

“I’m not talking about six-on-five right now,” he said.

It doesn’t matter now because the season is over, but the Blues have to figure out a better way of defending against the pulled-goalie situation, and Montgomery knows it.

“It’s an area of our team that has not been good all year and it’s an area I have to get better at so that our team is better next year at pulled goalie situations,” he said. “I don’t want to continue to talk about six-on-five (anymore). Like I said, we’ll analyze it, we’ll get better, OK? We can analyze this at the end of the year.”

The Blues had other issues, however.

After taking a 3-1 lead with 35 seconds left in the second period on a goal by Radek Faksa, they were outshot 34-18 from the start of the third period until the end of the game. And that was against a defense that was down to just five blueliners after Josh Morrissey left in the first period with an injury.

“I thought we had opportunities to make plays and we didn’t,” Montgomery said. “We forced a little too much offense and didn’t spend enough O-zone time in the first overtime. The second overtime, we were a little bit better.”

The Blues either led or were tied entering the third period in three of the four games in Winnipeg and lost each of them. They had their chances both earlier in the series and on Sunday, but came up short.

It’ll be a difficult loss and series to get past.

“No one gave us a chance right from the very beginning, but guys battled hard, guys competed hard for one another,” Schenn said.

“Just a relentless group that was just willing to buy in for each other,” Parayko said.

Montgomery said he walked into the Blues’ locker room afterward and said a few words.

“I went in and thanked them,” he said. “It really hurts right now. You lose Game 7 in overtime, especially when you have the lead going at the end, it just hurts. But I wanted to thank them for their effort, their execution and their part in helping change things. It took everybody on deck to be able to do what we did.”

And Montgomery believes what transpired after the 4 Nations Face-Off will bode well for the Blues’ future.

“What we did here in the last three months is we changed the culture back to where it needs to be, to be able to grow and get better,” he said. “Now we need to continue to have a great summer and grow as an organization on and off the ice, so that we can continue to build off this. That’s what we’ve done and we’ve got to continue to do it for our great fans.”

Some solace will be taken, but as Schenn concluded, “It’s just a tough way to lose when you’re that close to advancing.”