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In fact, for two games in a row, Washington had more scoring chances. For two games in a row, the Penguins won.

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Who cares?

Well, who cares about anything? But to the extent that you care about any sporting event, it seems like you’d want the team that plays better to win. If not, why are we watching the actual game? More than that, why are you (yes, you) investing emotional energy into an illogical and unfair endeavor in which the outcome can so often feel unrelated to the process? Why don’t you just watch grown men put on funny costumes and stand on a stage and flip coins against each other for three hours, and then whichever colored team flips more heads can be heralded with symphonies and parades and floral arrangements, and their supporters can feel an emotional rush unlike any they have ever felt before?

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Surprising results happen in every sport, stupid. That’s why they’re exciting. Don’t overthink this.

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Sure, but I’m not talking about surprising results. I’m not talking about a 13 seed beating a 4 seed because the 13 seed played better on one random Thursday night in March. That’s the wonderful unpredictability of sports: that a less talented team might out-play a better team on any given night. This hockey business is something different. This is suggesting that it doesn’t actually matter which team plays better. That the result is not linked to the actual performance. Which, if true, is agonizingly dumb.

Dumb?

Let me quote from Russian Machine’s Peter Hassett for a second. He noted that over the past two years, 16 NHL teams have played at least 300 five-on-five playoff minutes. Of those 16 teams, the Caps rank second in shots, second in scoring chances, second in high-danger scoring changes, and 10th in goals. His conclusion? Null.

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The Capitals have played great. They deserve to advance, but they probably won’t. If that happens, they’ll try again next year.

This doesn’t seem wrong, as a logical conclusion. But it seems supremely wrong, as a life choice. You (yes, you) are investing time, energy, emotion and intellectual curiosity into a pursuit that might even be sillier than organized coin-flipping! This is organized coin-flipping where the team with the weighted pro-heads coin still keeps losing! Who would make such a life choice?

Why do you care?

Let me explain why I care. This is an exact quote from my editor Wednesday night, explaining my deadline for a 1,000-word column that would run in The Washington Post, that the leader of the free world (Hi, Barack) might conceivably read while eating his morning bagel: “At the horn, then back in an hour.”

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At the horn, then back in an hour!

In real world terms, what that means is my 1,000 words — a logically pleasing and insightful reflection on the just-completed hockey game — had to be finished the second the game ended. Now, because of overtime, I wound up filing my story about 10 minutes after the game ended. Either way, to pull this off, one has to write not one but two logically pleasing reflections on the game: one assuming a Capitals victory, and one assuming a Capitals loss. I still have open the column that assumed a Caps victory. It was logically pleasing, maybe even more logically pleasing than the column assuming a loss. I noted that Washington refused to panic after Game 3’s illogic, that the Caps trusted their process, and that they were back in control.

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“They are heading home with home-ice advantage and that same confidence that powered the last six months of success,” the last paragraph read. “That was, after all, the script.”

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And what did you actually write?

That a championship-caliber team would have won that hockey game, which the Capitals lost.

So?

SO YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY WRITE TWO LOGICALLY PLEASING REFLECTIONS ON THE EXACT SAME EVENT — ONE DECIDED BY AN OVERTIME COIN FLIP — WITH TOTALLY OPPOSITE CONCLUSIONS. THAT IS STUPID. THAT IS WORSE THAN STUPID. THAT TEETERS ON DISHONESTY.

Sure, but those columns weren’t really about the exact same event. They were about two different events: one in which the Capitals scored an overtime goal, and one in which they did not.

Okay fine, but that assumes something about the Capitals and Penguins — some inner resolve, some grand plan, some bit of extra-time skill or effort, some individual wizardry, some collaborative mastery — determined which team won the overtime coin flip. And what was it that Barry Trotz said about the play that led to Pittsburgh’s goal, the play that was the difference between the Capitals right now being on track to win this series, or on the verge of having their season end?

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“It was more an unlucky play than anything.”

IT WAS MORE AN UNLUCKY PLAY THAN ANYTHING.

So much all-caps today.

After we accepted that the Game 3 result was basically unlucky, now we’re being told that Game 4 ended on an unlucky play? That a deciding factor in these events we pour so much of our lives into is luck? I swear, let me cover competitive coin-flipping. I can write you so many amazing narratives on Randolph H. Colmquist III, whose six consecutive “head” flips in the eighth round of the seventh fixture turned the tide for the Blue Coin Flipping Team, how this actually reflected the terrific leadership and team motto adopted by the Blue Coin Flipping Team during the offseason, how Randolph H. Colmquist III is Mr. Seventh Fixture.

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Yo, chill out man.

No, I won’t. Because read this, from Driving Play:

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In hockey, even controlling for everything we know, a vast majority of the matchups have odds between 55/45 and 65/35 either way. 3:1 favorites in a single game don’t happen often, which is why in small samples, we see extreme results.

That is a fancy way of saying that playoff hockey is competitive coin-flipping, with perhaps slightly weighted coins. Our time should be more valuable than that. Pouring our lives into the results of coin flips is masochism.

So what’s the solution?

You’re not going to like this, necessarily. But at least one solution is to continue telling ourselves that Randolph H. Colmquist III got those “head” flips because of his team’s terrific leadership and team motto and effort and skill.

And whether that’s true or not in competitive coin flipping, I think you can convince yourself of the little moments where that’s actually true in hockey. Matt Cullen might or might not have beaten Nicklas Backstrom to the puck Wednesday night, and he might or might not have put his shot where he wanted to, and Braden Holtby might or might not have stopped it. Cullen beat Backstrom and put the shot where he wanted to, and Holtby didn’t stop it. Regardless of everything else that happened that night, those things are true.

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Same thing with T.J. Oshie and that mini-breakaway on his knees. He might have beaten Matt Murray. He didn’t. Same thing with the game-winning goal. If you care about these events, you almost have to credit those actions with meaning.

Not every moment is like that. But some are. And I don’t know that it’s wrong for us to draw larger, grander, possibly illogical narratives out of all those little moments. That, to me, is a more satisfying way to look at a hockey series than “Penguins continue to be more lucky than good.” Because I really don’t want to spend my life covering events where “more lucky than good” is a successful strategy.

So, after citing convincing evidence that hockey is governed by small margins and luck-influenced outcomes, you’re going to choose to believe that hockey is instead governed by will and effort and narrative?

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Actually, I have no idea what I’m going to choose to believe. If you believe the Penguins might win this series thanks to being more lucky than good, and that two years in a row the Capitals played well enough to win but instead lost, I would say you’re a masochist for following this sport. If you believe instead that the Penguins are actually leading thanks to superior grit and skill and resolve and effort, and that the Capitals always lose in the playoffs due to an absence of those things, I would say you’re ignoring logical, data-based analysis to the contrary.