Wild didn't deserve to win Game 5 — but does deserve a shot at Game 6

Whether your higher power of choice is "hockey gods" or merely "puck luck," neither tends to be doled out in equal measure to hockey teams over the course of a playoff game.

It's one of the charms of postseason hockey: every game is seemingly up for grabs, regardless of the skill level or even the scoring chances for each team.

That notion was working against the Wild through four games of its series against Vegas. The Golden Knights were the better team, on average, over those first four. But it didn't take much squinting to see how the series could have been tied 2-2 heading into Monday's Game 5 instead of at a massive 3-1 edge for Vegas.

As such, it is possible to view Monday's 4-2 Wild victory — during which it fended off elimination and sent the series back to St. Paul for Wednesday's Game 6 — through two different lenses:

In being outshot 40-14 and being dominated in almost every other conceivable advanced metric, the Wild did not deserve to win Game 5. But if you believe in the eventual balancing out of breaks over a long series, the Wild was due — and deserved to arrive at a Game 6 and make this an actual series.

I talked about a lot of the inner workings of the game on Tuesday's Daily Delivery podcast. Two Wild fans I talked to after the game, with our conversations recorded for the podcast, revealed their confidence level in a Game 5 win was unsurprisingly at a dreary low before the puck dropped.

Their lack of faith was justified if you watched the game. Vegas had possession for about 75% of the game, had 70% of the scoring chances and almost 80% of the "high danger" chances. In terms of the dreaded "expected goals," which never seem to go the Wild's way, Vegas should have won 4-2 instead of losing 4-2.

"If you replay that game nine times out of 10, you probably win. We didn't tonight," Vegas coach Pete DeBoer said after the game.

But if Game 1 was a toss-up that went the Wild's way, there were moments or data points from Games 2, 3 and 4 that suggested the Wild should have taken one of them. In losing all three, perhaps the series seemed more lopsided that it really was?

Give coach Dean Evason credit for not panicking — for staying the course with minor tweaks instead of major lineup tinkering, and for setting aside whatever grudge exists with Zach Parise to give him a bigger role that was rewarded with a classic Parise bank shot that gave the Wild a lead it never relinquished.

Give goalie Cam Talbot massive kudos for 38 saves — including stopping 21 of 22 shots in a second period where the ice was almost vertically tilted in the Golden Knights' favor but the Wild somehow emerged from with a 3-2 lead intact, a critical edge that it hadn't been able to sustain during previous Vegas second-period barrages.

Give Kirill Kaprizov a stick tap for his first career playoff goal, as he kept battling despite very much aggressive attention paid to him and an officiating crew inclined to let them play.

And give the Wild credit overall. This has been a resilient, tight-knit team all season as Minnesota overachieved its way to 75 regular-season points in 56 games (a pace for 110 in a normal year). Ending the playoffs in five games would have been a disappointment and a postseason underachievement.

Getting to a Game 6 — an ugly win but a justified advancement — always felt like the baseline for what was acceptable in a series against a favored opponent. Now the Wild gets another crack at a home win and the opportunity to set up a winner-take-all Game 7.

And at that point, all they would need is 60 more minutes of puck luck or hockey gods to truly pull off something special.