The Canadiens' season was already headed in the right direction before Thursday night's game even started.
Nick Suzuki came back from the hand injury he picked up when Michael Kesselring's shot caught him on Oct. 20, put up a goal and two assists, and the building exhaled like the captain had just hauled a sinking ship back to shore, though the ship had never been sinking. While he sat out six games, Montreal went 5-0-1 and climbed to second in the Atlantic. The team was winning without the reigning Selke winner who put up a career-high 101 points last season. His return is a luxury on an already-good roster.
Credit for Thursday belongs to Cole Caufield, who's turned overtime into his personal office. Thirty seconds into the extra period he faked a slap shot on a 2-on-1 and snapped a wrister over Sebastian Cossa's right shoulder, and it was done. He reached 15 career overtime goals in 384 games, faster than Connor McDavid got there. That's an absurd knack, and it's the biggest reason this one went in the win column.
RatingUtah was the better team Thursday. The Mammoth outshot Montreal 47-22. Logan Cooley scored his second hat trick in four games. Montreal fell behind 2-0, then 3-2, then 4-3, and had to claw its way level every single time, with Adam Engstrom burying the tying goal, the first of his career, with 5:06 left. A team getting out-chanced for sixty minutes and rescued by a sniper in the sixty-first has not figured anything out.
The resilience is real. Kirby Dach and Arber Xhekaj each scored their first of the season, Engstrom scored his first ever to force overtime, and a group that gave away a four-goal lead two nights earlier didn't fold the second it fell behind again. That matters.
Two nights earlier against Winnipeg, this same team coughed up a 4-0 lead in the final 2:39 and lost in overtime, the latest four-goal comeback in league history, the actual low point of the season. Beating Utah answers it emotionally. It does nothing about whatever let it happen, and the 47 shots Montreal gave up on Thursday suggest the leak is still there.
The turnaround question is the wrong one to ask. The Canadiens were a good team before Suzuki got hurt and a good team while he was out. The worry was always the volume of chances going the other way, and that trend got worse on a night the scoreboard flattered them.
They're at Toronto on Saturday. If they get run out of the building on shots the way they were against Utah, the overtime magic won't always be there to cover it. The win is Caufield's. The turnaround is a story people decided to tell before the numbers agreed.
