The Islanders needed this third period, needed it more than they would’ve liked to admit.
Not because the results hadn’t been coming lately — two losses in three is hardly cause for alarm bells to start ringing — but because the process hadn’t been there.
They knew it, the fans knew it, everyone watching the first two periods against the Leafs on Saturday knew it.
The Islanders trailed by just a 2-1 margin through 40 minutes but the way things were going, it didn’t feel much better than the 7-2 game they’d played in losing to the Mammoth two days prior.
They had 20 minutes to flip the narrative on its head and that’s just what they did. By the end, they’d come back to beat the Maple Leafs 4-3 on Matthew Schaefer’s overtime winner and recover some of the swagger that had taken a dent last week. If that holds, it might end up being just as important as the two points.
The spark came — of course it came — from Schaefer.
The Islanders had looked better right from the jump in the third. Tony DeAngelo hit the post, Simon Holmstrom sailed a tip barely wide, the Islanders cycled the puck and looked a real threat to score.
But it was Schaefer, the 18-year-old dynamo playing his hometown team for the first time, on Hockey Night in Canada, who produced a moment of utter brilliance, skating past three defenders, cutting to the net and scoring to tie the game at two at 11:10 of the third.
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The Leafs re-took the lead just 1:02 later when Emil Heineman lost Nicholas Robertson in front, giving the winger clearance to deposit the puck in the net for a 3-2 lead, but the tone and tenor of the night had inexorably changed.
Emil Heineman’s right-circle one-timer from Mat Barzal tied the game back at three at the 17:15 mark, marking the first time since Dec. 11 the Islanders have scored three times in a game.
For good measure, they made it four as Schaefer ripped in Barzal’s feed for the win.
Through the first 40 minutes, the Islanders looked like a team whose problems had gone beyond their myriad of injuries, though missing Bo Horvat with a lower-body ailment certainly hadn’t improved matters.
In scoring twice to break the Maple Leafs’ all-time goals record some 18 years after Mats Sundin passed Darryl Sittler against the Islanders, Auston Matthews first spun Scott Mayfield around on his way to beating David Rittich at 9:30 of the second, tying the game at one.
On the ice from Long Island
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Just under eight minutes later, Matthews rifled in a right-circle one-timer from Bobby McMann after Max Domi had knocked Ryan Pulock off the puck while exiting the zone for a 2-1 Toronto lead that marked Goal No. 491 and the Leafs spilled off the bench in congratulations
That was typical of two periods where the Islanders’ failures were far more expansive than merely not generating enough chances. They couldn’t hold the puck in the offensive zone either, and that was when they made it that far up the ice at all.
Mostly, the Leafs were harder on the puck and the Islanders succumbed to their forecheck before so much as exiting the neutral zone.
Patrick Roy toggled his second and third lines after the first period, moving JG Pageau between Jonathan Drouin and Simon Holmstrom with Cal Ritchie centering Max Tsyplakov and Max Shabanov.
Pageau’s newly-minted line was on the ice when Adam Pelech’s point shot made it through traffic to put the Islanders up 1-0 1:10 into the second, but that spark proved utterly fleeting, at least until the third.
As for what eventually came, the question now is whether the Islanders can hang on and keep it going.
