Panthers, Oilers one step away from rarest of playoff history

If you don’t have a dog in the hunt, the choice is easy, right? You’re lining up behind the Oilers on Monday night. They have a chance to join one of the most select clubs in sports, the one that permits teams and fans to dream even under the dreariest circumstances, that reminds us that the wisest sporting words ever uttered came from Yogi Berra:

“It ain’t over till it’s over.”

The Oilers were down three games to none. They were dead. They looked spent. They looked overmatched. The Florida Panthers, even the ones trying hard not to invite the wrath of jinxing gods, had probably already begun to see their names on the Stanley Cup.

Now, it is 3-3.

Now, Edmonton looks to become only the sixth team in the history of North American sports to spot another team the first three games in a best-of-seven, then put together the most well-timed and illogical four-game winning streak of the year.

The first seven-game series in modern team sports was 1905, New York Giants against the Philadelphia Athletics. The first time the NHL went to a best-of-seven was 1919, the Montreal Canadiens and the original Ottawa Senators. The NBA introduced best-of sevens right away, in 1947, the Philadelphia Warriors and the Chicago Stags.

Overwhelmingly, in all three sports, those series end either in a sweep or, as in the case of the three examples above, a “gentleman’s sweep” of four games to one — the Giants, Canadiens and Warriors all won those initial best-of-sevens that way, 4-1.

Sometimes, a team can push it to six. Remarkably, it took baseball until 1999 before that happened, the Mets spotting the Braves a 3-0 lead, winning Games 4 and 5, and then Kenny Rogers lost the strike zone in Game 6.

And on even rare occasions, there’s a Game 7.

It’s happened exactly once in baseball, as you may recall. That was 2004. That was the Yankees, up 3-0 in games, winners 19-8 in Game 3, three outs away from a most ungentlemanly sweep, Mariano Rivera on the mound and … well, I won’t complete this drive-by of Yankees fans who have yet to throw their newspaper or iPhone across the room.

It’s happened only four times in the NBA, most recently last year when the Celtics fought back against the Heat in the East finals before somehow surrendering Game 7, at home. The Trail Blazers threw a scare into Dirk Nowitzki and the Mavericks in a 2003 first-round series, and the Nuggets did the same to the Jazz in 1994, in a second-round series one round after Denver became the first No. 8 seed to take out a No. 1.

The closest an NBA team ever came to pulling off the comeback was 1951, the Knicks and the Rochester Royals, the Knicks falling behind 3-0 (thanks, in part, to the Knicks having to move their home games — remarkably — from the old Madison Square Garden to the 69th Regiment Armory). But they roared back and even had a 74-73 lead with under two minutes to go in Game 7 at Rochester’s Edgerton Park Arena before bowing 79-75.

Unsurprisingly, this is the 10th time an NHL team has caromed back from 0-3 to 3-3, unsurprising since hockey is naturally privy to more unique whims than any other sport (hot goalie, extreme momentum shifts, weird bounces into odd spaces).

Four teams have closed the deal. The 1942 Maple Leafs pulled this off first in the 1942 Cup Finals (before the Red Wings nearly paid them back in kind three years later). The 2011 Bruins not only blew a 3-0 lead in games but a 3-0 lead in Game 7 to the Flyers. The 2014 Kings rallied back against San Jose (and carried that good mojo all the way to a Cup).

And of course there were the 1975 Islanders, who not only came all the way back from 3-0 down to beat the Penguins in the Cup quarterfinals, but forced a Game 7 against the defending-champion Flyers in the semis before dropping Game 7, 4-1.

“It wasn’t just trying to win one game at a time, or one period at a time,” Chico Resch, the nexus of those Islanders, told me a few years ago. “It was one shift at a time. One minute at a time. You can’t do the bigger thing till you do the little stuff.”

The Oilers know that part already. Still, the hardest step awaits. Five of those previous nine NHL teams that came ever so perilously close couldn’t finish the deal, including the 1939 Rangers, and usually that hits harder than a sweep might have. Down 3-0 to the Bruins in the Cup semis, the Blueshirts eked out wins of 2-1, 2-1 and 3-1 before playing Game 7 at Boston Garden.

They were tied at the end of regulation. Tied after one overtime. Tied after two. Then Mel Hill scored eight minutes into the third OT, the Bruins won, 2-1, and Rangers coach Lester Patrick was moved to say, “I’m not sure when I’m going to stop feeling sick about this.”

If the Oilers lose, they’ll understand plenty.