A little more than a minute into the second period of Sunday night’s Stanley Cup Finals game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators, the Predators’ Colton Sissons scored what appeared to be the first goal of the game, with a sprawling flick that sent the puck past the Penguins’ goalie, Matt Murray. Yet just as Sissons jumped up to celebrate, he was greeted by the raised arms of the referee, indicating that the ref had blown his whistle before the puck had gone into the net, calling the play dead. Nashville’s home crowd was not pleased; on NBC’s broadcast of the game, the microphone picked up the lone voice of a single fan, speaking for all: “Are you fucking serious?” When the ref, after a brief huddle with his colleagues, skated to near-center ice to brave the crowd’s wrath with an explanation over the P.A. system—“The whistle had gone; we have no goal”—he was met with what sounded less like booing than like the cry of a very large, wounded animal.

It was agreed in the moment and then again, upon much reflection, that the referee in question, Kevin Pollock, had messed up. It wasn’t an errant whistle, just an early one. The referee is, by the rules, supposed to blow the whistle on a play the moment he can no longer see the puck, which is almost always evidence that the goalie has secured it. In this case, Murray had done no such thing. A shot by Filip Forsberg trickled under his pads to the far side of the goal, where Sissons quickly knocked it in. The Predators didn’t score again, and the game’s scoreless tie wasn’t broken until the final, frantic moments of the third period, when the Penguins scored a goal—and then added an empty-netter—to win the series.

Fans of the losing side like to gripe about the one bad call that doomed their team, but in this case Predators supporters have a fair case. Sure, the call happened with nearly two periods left to play; sure, the Predators had plenty of other chances to score, including during several power plays. But, in a closely fought elimination game that was decided, in effect, by a single score, having a clear goal taken off the board can rightly be seen as crushing. “Obviously, 1–0 is better than a tight game,” Forsberg said afterward. It doesn’t help that the performance of the referees had been criticized throughout the playoffs, or that the Predators were still smarting from a contentious offsides call that cost them a goal in Game 1. Another goal by the Predators, in Game 4, would not have counted had a replay review not been triggered from off the ice.

While it’s mostly thankless, from a fan-appreciation standpoint, to be a referee, it is especially lonely for the referee who has made a mistake. The operating assumption of sports has it that refs are never allowed to be wrong—a standard to which we rarely hold the players, and one to which we certainly never hold ourselves. Refs don’t get famous for the good calls. Mostly, fans view refs with suspicion or derision. They are at the center of fans’ conspiracy theories about sports, the supposed agents of the nefarious (or merely corporatist) desires of the leagues that employ them. An entire subgenre of basketball history, for instance, is devoted to determining which playoff games through the years were supposedly swayed by which referees. It doesn’t help, of course, that the N.B.A. did employ a crooked ref, Tim Donaghy, for thirteen years; he resigned, in 2007, after the F.B.I. investigated him for making calls in order to affect the point spread of games he officiated. But in most cases, as with most things in sports, the simpler answer is the correct one—things move quickly, and people screw up.

Watching on TV makes it all look so easy. But refereeing is an athletic endeavor unto itself—especially in hockey, where the refs deftly skate amid the action while managing not to be in it, mostly staying out of the way as the players glide around the ice and the puck scoots in all directions. When a ref is hit by a puck or caught amid the scrum of the players, it is a momentary jolt, a tear in the flow of the sport. It always looks like the odd encroachment of an interloper, when it should be a reminder that the refs are truthfully as much a part of what is unfolding as the players. But while a player who makes a mistake will likely have an opportunity to redeem himself with some later moment of athletic glory, a referee who botches a call can only hope to keep his job, and to return, in time, to anonymity.

Whenever a referee errs on a grand stage, I am reminded of the retired Major League Baseball umpire Jim Joyce, who, in 2010, made one of the worst calls in the history of baseball. On a stray June night, the Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was one out away from throwing a perfect game. He induced a grounder to the first baseman, ran over to cover the bag, and was seen to touch it a moment before the runner. Yet Joyce, betrayed by his own eyes, threw up the safe sign, spoiling what would have been a historic moment. It wasn’t even all that close. Joyce had been wrong, and, because the league hadn’t instituted the replay system it now uses, his error couldn’t be corrected.

Joyce was immediately contrite—offering an outpouring of grief that is rare among officials. Later, he and Galarraga co-wrote a book about the play, and the different paths they took to that fateful moment, and Joyce detailed just how anguished his mistake had left him. He recalls sitting up that night after the game, smoking Winstons, trying to make sense of what he’d done. “Can’t explain it. Can’t understand it,” he wrote. “I just missed it, is all. I saw it one way and the rest of the world saw it another.” Galarraga, for his part, came to see the event from a different perspective: the game may not have been recorded as perfect, but for him—in the joy he felt pitching that night, and in the feeling that he had making what should have been that final out—it had been.

But these stories are, essentially, sad ones. Kevin Pollock won’t get a chance to call Sunday night’s play over. After the game, the Predators players said what their fans, whose exuberance of late has turned Nashville into a kind of Hockeytown South, are most likely not ready to hear. “It’s tough,” the Predators’ captain, Mike Fisher, told the reporter John Shannon. “But that’s sports.”