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“It’s a tough play,” said forward Pavel Buchnevich, one of the players who was on the ice when Winnipeg scored with 2.2 seconds remaining to send the game to overtime. “I couldn’t believe it happened. You’re like: What is happening? After we landed here, it was a tough night. I couldn’t fall asleep, overthinking what you can do differently.”

“It hurts more today than it did two days ago, to be honest,” said coach Jim Montgomery as the team held its season-ending meetings on Tuesday. “But we will use it to grow. I’ll make sure that we’re better in pulled-goalie situations. That’s my job.”

“My job, I think, is to look at things from 30,000 feet,” said general manager Doug Armstrong, “not one game, one shift, one two-minute segment. That’s all I can think about right now is one two-minute segment.”

Had the Blues been able to hold off the Jets for just a couple more seconds, they would have been in Dallas on Tuesday getting ready for the start of their playoff series with the Stars. Instead, they were in Enterprise Center, packing up their gear, having exit meetings and then heading for wherever they call home.

Items of note from the day that was earlier than any of them wanted:

• Dylan Holloway and Tyler Tucker were done: The Blues, in standard playoff form, had been mum on the injuries to Holloway and Tucker, terming Holloway “week to week” and Tucker “day to day,” but neither was going to be back no matter how long the playoffs went.

Holloway was injured April 3, two weeks before the end of the season, and had surgery. Armstrong said he would be 100% by the start of camp. Holloway emerged as a key player for the Blues this season, playing on the second line with Brayden Schenn and Jordan Kyrou. He had 26 goals and 37 assists.

Tucker, a defenseman, had the game-winning goal in Game 4 but also fell awkwardly in that game and likely hurt his knee. Tucker played in 38 games in the regular season before dropping out of the lineup when the unit got healthy. He was back in the playoffs, appearing in Games 2, 3 and 4 before getting hurt. Armstrong said Tucker’s injury was a non-surgical candidate.

• Armstrong thinks Torey Krug won’t play again: Krug sat out the season after having surgery to repair a condition in his left ankle, and Armstrong doesn’t envision the veteran defenseman returning to the ice.

“I talked to him at the rink the other day,” Armstrong said. “He’s just getting almost normal day-to-day living with the ankle, so I’m not expecting him to play again. Now, he’s hoping I’m wrong, and I’m hoping I’m wrong, and he’s pushing, but the surgery he had there was very, very invasive.”

Krug, who has two seasons left on his contract, missed the entire 2024-25 season after being diagnosed with pre-arthritic changes in his left ankle and having subtalar fusion surgery. The trouble dates back to a playoff game with Boston in 2018 where he crashed into the boards and fractured “a few bones,” Krug said at the start of the season.

The pain gradually got worse and rest didn’t help, so he made the decision in September to have surgery, which kept him out for the season.

• Interest in Cam Fowler: Defenseman Fowler, acquired in December in a trade with Anaheim, has one more year to go on his contract, and both he and Armstrong expressed interest in working out a new deal. Fowler is 33, but Armstrong likes what he’s seen.

“He looks like a great, conditioned athlete,” said Armstrong. “He’s a great person. I’m getting to see that more and more every day, and he’s fitting into where we are next year and we’ll see about moving forward. ... The impact that Fowler had on our group, sliding into your top four, top three, likely two, statistically being one of the top players in the game in his position from the day he got here.”

“Those decisions and those conversations will have to be something that we go through over the summer with Doug and the whole group here, but I would love to be around as long as they’d like me here,” Fowler said. “I can’t say enough about this team and this city and what it means to be a Blue and what that means for the players and for the fans in the community. It’s just something that I’ve really enjoyed.”

The Blues can’t extend Fowler until after July 1, when he enters the last season of his contract, but they can talk with fourth-line center Radek Faksa, whose group emerged as a key one on the team.

“He and I had a good conversation,” Armstrong said. “It’s something that I want to reflect back on. We want to grow. We have young players that we want to grow, but we don’t want to disregard what he meant to us.”

• Second guessing: Montgomery said if there was one thing he could have done differently in the final minutes of regulation, it would have been using his timeout.

“We had a couple of icings,” he said, “but I think there was one deflection play where I could have called the timeout and just go over the plan again. We had gone over it between the periods on TV in the locker room and their best players were on a significant amount of time, so I didn’t want to give them a rest, but probably us going over that plan was probably something that could have helped us. Definitely could have helped us.”

Armstrong described how he felt in the last two minutes as, simply, “Awful.”

“I never felt comfortable,” he said, “because I hadn’t had enough information to to think that that was a time to feel comfortable. We had been down that path too often and had bad things happen to us that it was uncomfortable and our worst fears came to pass that we hadn’t learned enough, as an organization, coaches, players, all of us, how to close those game out. And it bit us at the worst time, and that was something we couldn’t figure out.”

• Next stop, Sweden: Armstrong said Dalibor Dvorsky (Slovakia) and Alexandre Texier (France) would take part at the world championships that start Friday in Sweden.