The San Jose Sharks Keep Winning At The Last Possible Moment

It has been 2,500 days, give or take a week, since the San Jose Sharks last played a truly meaningful hockey game. That game was a series-ending 5-1 loss to St. Louis in the 2019 Western Conference Finals, and since then, the Sharks have been the worst team in the league both by record and, justifiably enough, by attendance. Whatever else you may think of Sharks fans, which we accept is essentially nothing one way or another, they are discerning. So the team has come up with a couple of shameless gimmicks to juice the house. The first was to invent an AI character named "Macklin Celebrini" to electrify and entertain on a nearly nightly basis, and when that seemed to hit a wall, they added a new twist to the Celebrini (which is the trendiest new aperitif order at your tonier bistros) by waiting until the last minute to score a game-winning goal. The Sharks trotted that move out in Columbus last Saturday, with a goal from Igor Chernyshov with 95 seconds left to beat the confounding Blue Jackets, 3-2, in Ohio. But this innovation needed to be tested at home before their own customers to see if it would work there as well, and so Monday night the Sharks beat St. Louis, 5-4, thanks to an Adam Gaudette goal with 22 seconds to play. But that was before their first non-sellout crowd since early January, and so they tried it again last night against Anaheim with an added boost—they used a Celebrini goal with 1:39 left to tie the game (his 40th) and then an Alexander Wennberg goal with 31 seconds to play to win it, assisted of course by the Teal Refresher himself. This is the first time in NHL history that a team has won three consecutive games with a goal in the last two minutes of regulation, and serves as irrefutable testimony that the Sharks will try nearly any ridiculous idea to avoid wasting any more of the Celebrini they have in stock.