MONTREAL— Keith Kinkaid sat at his stall with his head buried between his hands and half his equipment filed away in his bag following his 39-save performance in what turned out to be a loss on Saturday night.

It was a loss that brought his record to 1-1-2 on the season, and a loss that did nothing to help the unflattering numbers attached to his name.

Kinkaid now has a 4.23 goals-against average and a .887 save percentage through four games in a Montreal Canadiens uniform.

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This one stung him. That it came against his former team, the New Jersey Devils, added insult to injury.

“It’s a tough one to swallow,” the 30-year-old Farmington, N.Y., native said. “Obviously a lot of motivation to beat them.”

But he couldn’t do it on his own.

Here’s the silver lining for Kinkaid—and one the Canadiens can look to as well. He was able to get them a point in the standings on a night where they weren’t at all deserving of one.

In the grand scheme of things, that’s a vital development for a team that’s trying to reduce Carey Price’s (massive) workload. Kinkaid needs to be able to trust himself, the Canadiens need to be able to trust him, and this performance should help in that process.

Kinkaid made 19 saves in the first period. In the second, he made 13 and was beat on a perfect shot from Nico Hischier, who he stopped on a breakaway seconds earlier with an emphatic right-pad save. And in the third, a tic-tac-toe play between Jack Hughes, Taylor Hall and Wayne Simmonds led to a power-play goal Kinkaid had no chance of stopping.

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Kyle Palmieri iced the game with a 4-on-3 power-play one-timer at 1:30 of the overtime period, and he and his Devils teammates filed off the ice with former Canadien P.K. Subban thanking them for the win. Kinkaid got up slowly, shrugged his shoulders and made the lonely skate over to Montreal’s bench and the lonelier walk to his stall in the dressing room.

He was so close to a win. The Canadiens held a 3-2 advantage on the strength of Cale Fleury’s first NHL goal and Nick Suzuki’s fifth, and they squandered it with a string of penalties in the third period—culminating in Max Domi taking his first minor of the season for kicking away an opposing player’s stick, and his second one for chastising one of the officials on his way to the box. That eventually led to the Simmonds goal.

And then there was the bizarre sequence in the final minute of regulation, when Subban pushed Canadiens centre Phillip Danault into the crease and the puck eventually crossed the line.

The officials reviewed the play and deemed that Danault had “kicked” it into the net.

“We work on hip thrusts for a reason, that’s not really a kick,” Kinkaid joked. “I don’t know what they were thinking.”

They weren’t wrong on the play despite Danault’s protestations. Kicking wasn’t the right description, but Rule 78.5 on disallowed goals clearly states a puck cannot be “directed, batted or thrown into the net by an attacking player other than with a stick.”

Kinkaid and co. were more frustrated with the fact that the official missed Hischier closing his hand on the puck in the crease, which should have resulted in a penalty shot.

“They didn’t see that,” Danault said.

It wasn’t reviewable.

It wasn’t why Montreal lost the game, either.

The Canadiens were half asleep in the first period. After taking no penalties in the first two periods, they took six of them over the course of the rest of the game. And for the 10th and 11th time this season, they allowed goals—one to Nikita Gusev and one to Hischier—in the final minute of a period.

“It’s unacceptable if you want to win hockey games,” Canadiens coach Claude Julien said in his post-game comments. “It’s what cost us the game tonight. In the first period, we got out of our zone and came back into it with the puck when there was less than one minute. It’s clear that can’t happen. And then, when you give a breakaway and a 2-on-1 with 30 seconds left in a period while you’re on a power play, I think those actions belong to us.

“When you play two games in two nights (the Canadiens beat the Washington Capitals 5-2 on Friday), one thing that can save you or give you a chance to win is that you have to be mentally alert.”

On this night, Kinkaid mitigated that issue.

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“He was awesome. That’s why we got a point,” said Brendan Gallagher, who scored Montreal’s first goal (his ninth of the season).

“We know that we were sloppy and we weren’t as sharp as we needed to be. They came out early and they bombarded (Kinkaid) with shots. He earned us a point tonight and it’s disappointing we weren’t able to get him two.”

Certainly.

But Kinkaid should be leaving the Bell Centre feeling good about how he played and hopeful that he can end up on the winning side more often than not if he continues to play as he did in this game.

That’s important considering the six-year NHL veteran of 155 games was signed in the off-season to a one-year, $1.75-million contract to redeem himself from a down season in New Jersey and to give Price more rest.