Arizona Coyotes' Antoine Vermette celebrates a goal by teammate Oliver Ekman-Larsson (not shown) on Montreal Canadiens goaltender Dustin Tokarski, left, as Canadiens Andrei Markov defends during third period NHL hockey action in Montreal, Sunday, February 1, 2015.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
No one in professional sports spends much time dwelling on the idea that their fate is sometimes simply out of their hands, that there are no percentages in it.
Fine, but here's the reality: When you get 12 people on a sheet of ice with skates, sticks and a puck, weird things are bound to happen.
Some of them will be lucky, others not – although that tends to be a subjective measure that depends entirely on which end of the score you find yourself on.
All of which brings us, at last, to the Montreal Canadiens, one of the National Hockey League's horseshoe-iest teams.
The Habs are, statistically speaking, the best defensive club in the NHL.
They've allowed the fewest goals overall by a healthy margin, and have given up just one more even-strength marker than the Nashville Predators (another perennially stingy bunch).
They have a top-five penalty kill, are in the top half of teams in terms of short-handed opportunities gifted to opponents and are the best faceoff team in the league, which in theory helps matters in the defensive end.
What they aren't, however, is singularly proficient at playing stoutly in their own end and smoothly exiting said defensive zone. This can be survived most nights when you have a human eraser in net to eliminate all traces of your bungles and mishaps – going into Sunday only Tampa Bay had won more games this year while being outshot.
Goalie Carey Price just closed out the month of January with a 7-1-1 record (including shutouts in his past two starts) and an insane .951 save percentage.
Price is the NHL's best even-strength netminder – his .942 percentage is tops among regular starters – and has saved more than 95 per cent of the shots he's faced in 17 of this 39 starts (also tops in the league).
On Sunday, as each team played its fourth game in six nights, Price was sitting at the end of the home bench. Backup goalie Dustin Tokarski was given the task of facing down one of the league's bottom-feeders, the Arizona Coyotes.
It didn't go well.
The Yotes, of course, are a dead team skating – general manager Don Maloney has made it plain he wants to blow up the roster; the only untouchable is captain Shane Doan, primarily because his contract says he can't be touched.
Arizona was also giving 22-year-old goalie Louis Domingue, who grew up in suburban Montreal, his first NHL start.
The Habs put two of the first five shots he faced into the net (both of them off Alex Galchenyuk's stick) and then mysteriously stopped shooting. The Habs took only eight shots between the end of the first period and the 15-minute mark of the third.
In that time, Montreal also saw its typically good fortune evaporate.
With the Habs up 2-0 in the second, Max Pacioretty's wrist shot clanged off the iron – something the Washington Capitals accomplished three times against Price on Saturday in a 1-0 loss – and Arizona caught a couple of breaks.
First, defenceman Oliver Ekman-Larsson bookended his stupendously unlikely long-distance goal against Toronto last week with an equally risible sharp-angled shot from the side boards.
The puck skipped through Tokarski at the near post and made the game 2-2 in the opening minute of the third.
"It was a bad goal," a glum Tokarski said. "It was a momentum-changer."
It was, in a cosmic sense, perfectly consistent for Coyotes forward Lauri Korpikoski to then bank the winner in off a sliding Alexei Emelin with Montreal defenceman Tom Gilbert off for the merest of hooks (it was Korpikoski's second of the game, the first having come on a deflection that was close enough to being a high stick that it required a lengthy review – hey, sometimes you're lucky.)
"To win a hockey game you need breaks and the right call at the right time," Habs coach Michel Therrien said. "The line between winning and losing is very thin."
Galchenyuk, who didn't looked especially chuffed at having achieved a new personal high-water mark for goals (he now has 15 on the year), used the word "bounce" and its variants half-a-dozen times in a short postgame scrum.
"A couple of games we've got good bounces, now the other team got the bounces, we've just got to refresh, regroup and get ready for the next game," he said.
Isn't the first half of that sentence what Sunday's tilt was really about?
Providence is among the many aspects of the game that hockey's advanced stats community has analyzed. There exists a rough measure of luck called PDO, which essentially aggregates even-strength shooting percentage and save percentage.
The Habs are second in PDO behind Nashville this season. Both teams are buoyed by superior goaltending and (likely) unsustainable shooting – Montreal's numbers in the latter category have duly begun dipping over the past month.
So scoff if you must at the Habs' invocation of luck.
They're likely just surprised to be on the losing end of it.