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WINNIPEG, Manitoba — After a regular season that finished on such a high note that saw the Blues build so much optimism, the ending couldn’t possibly be worse.

The Blues came just about as close as possible to advancing to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs — only 2.2 seconds away, closer than any team in NHL history had come to closing out a playoff Game 7 and not doing it. And after giving up the tying goal on a redirection, it took 36 minutes and eight seconds of overtime for Winnipeg to get the game winner, with Adam Lowry, who was born in ӣ����Ƶ when his father Dave was playing for the Blues, tipping in a shot by Neal Pionk that glanced off of Oskar Sundqvist on its way to Lowry. Winnipeg won both the game and the series 4-3 on Sunday night at Canada Life Centre.

What could have been an impressive road win in a Game 7 over the best team in the league in the regular season and a milestone in the team’s quicker-than-expected recovery in its retooling process, instead turned into a collapse for the ages, a finish that Blues players and fans will have a hard time forgetting. Winnipeg is just the fourth team in NHL history to win after overcoming a multi-goal deficit in the final two minutes of a playoff game, and this is in a league that started in 1917. The Jets moved on to face Dallas in the division finals, while the Blues start an offseason whose earlier-than-hoped-for start will eat at them.

“Yeah, that one stinks,” said Blues captain Brayden Schenn. “That one sucks. Just from a two-goal lead and two six-on-five goals against and a second and a half away from closing out the series ... sucks. It’s brutal. We had a good group in there that played hard for one another all year, and there’s no other words to really describe that one.”

“It really hurts right now,” said Blues coach Jim Montgomery. “You lose Game 7 in overtime, especially when you have the lead going at the end. It just hurts.”

While the Jets were living out every hockey-playing kid’s childhood dream of scoring the game-winning goal in overtime of Game 7, the Blues were experiencing the nightmare side of it. The Blues either led or were tied going into the third period in three of the four games in Winnipeg and lost all of them, getting outscored 7-1 in four third periods in Winnipeg. That led to this being just the 11th series in NHL history where the home team won every game.

And the season ended because of one of the few problems Montgomery wasn’t able to fix when he took over: defense when the opponent pulls its goalie. The Blues led the league with 13 goals allowed when the opponent brought on an extra attacker. There were only eight goals allowed in the first round of the playoffs when a team pulled its goalie, and two of them were against the Blues on Sunday.

“It’s an area of our team that has not been good all year,” Montgomery said, “and it’s an area I have to get better at so that our team is better next year at pulled-goalie situations.”

It looked like the Blues had finally solved the mystery of winning on the road in this series. Jordan Kyrou scored 70 seconds into the game to put the Blues up 1-0, and Mathieu Joseph, who was in and out of the lineup in this series, scored on a turnover and also knocked Winnipeg’s top defenseman, Jake Morrissey, out of the game on the same play. Winnipeg scored a power-play goal in the second period to briefly pull within a goal, but Radek Faksa scored in the final minute of the second period to make it 3-1.

While Winnipeg applied pressure in the third period and the Blues applied little, the Blues protected their lead until, with 3:14 to go, the Jets pulled goalie Connor Hellebuyck for a sixth attacker. With 1:56 to go, Winnipeg got within a goal again when Vladislav Namestnikov’s shot caromed in off Schenn’s stick. The Jets put Hellebuyck back in goal for the resumption of play, then pulled him again with 1:26 left. If the Blues could hold on for those 86 seconds, they would be headed to Dallas.

They could not, but oh, did they come close. There was a scramble in the crease that left the puck sitting on the goal line, stopped by Parayko’s stick, that needed the referees to go to the replay to confirm their call. The Blues iced the puck twice, and then it came back for the fateful final seconds in which a lot happened in very little time and even the smallest play by the Blues could have bought them the time they needed to win.

The puck was in the corner to goaltender Jordan Binnington’s right, and then it went in back of the net, where, with nine seconds left, Gabriel Vilardi backhanded it out toward Pavel Buchnevich, but he couldn’t control it with eight seconds left. That got the puck to Lowry, who passed to Nikolaj Ehlers at the blue line. He whiffed on his shot, and it came back to Lowry with five seconds left.

At four seconds, Lowry had the puck back to Ehlers, who this time passed cross-ice to Kyle Connor, who hurriedly put the puck on goal, spinning so violently with the shot he almost fell over. The shot was off target but came to Cole Perfetti in the slot, who stuck out his stick and put it in the roof of the net. As the arena went wild, Binnington laid face down on the ice.

The scoreboard clock said 1.6 seconds but after a review was set back to 2.2.

“We think we can get the puck and win the battle,” Montgomery said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t and we’re out of structure, and that’s why there’s an odd-man ... there’s a three-on-two at the net. They whiffed on their one-timer, and it went right to a guy in the slot. For whatever reason, puck luck in this series, if you look at the home teams, the puck luck was incredible. That’s why I think you ended up with seven wins by the home teams.”

“I fan on the first one,” Ehlers said, “so I thought, I’m not going to let that happen again. And I knew KC was over there. If we can get the goalie moving just a little bit, we might be able to create something. And he made a great play. Fetts was standing in the perfect spot in there, and that’s nice.”

“Just didn’t get the job done,” Schenn said. “We thought we played a solid 58 minutes tonight. Unfortunately, the last two gave them life.”

The Blues had just four shots on goal in the third period and had just four in the first overtime. (They were outshot 34-13 in the final three periods.) They were more active in the second overtime, but so was Winnipeg. On the game winner, Pionk, who played 45:46 in the game, took a shot that glanced off Sundqvist and was headed right at Binnington, only for Lowry to get his stick in and divert the puck to the far side of the net. The Blues could only stand there in stunned disappointment.

“It’s just a tough way to lose when you’re that close to advancing,” said Schenn.