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There’s no way to sugar-coat it. Montreal’s triple-overtime defeat Saturday night was a knee-buckler of a loss.

The longest game in the history of the PWHL ended with a whimper 11 minutes and 44 seconds into the third overtime period when Boston forward Taylor Wenczkowski (zero goals and zero assists in 16 regular-season games and one previous playoff game) scored a typical OT winner, beating Ann-Renée Desbiens with a quick tap from a scramble in front.

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With that, Montreal had its second straight overtime loss to Boston, a yawning 2-0 deficit in a five-game series after nearly eight hours of brutal playoff hockey yielding blood, sweat and tears and nothing else.

Heartbreaker? That’s being kind.

It hurt. It hurt for them, the pioneering women who battled through this brief season only to see it circling the drain after two marathon games that went to Boston after an eternity on the ice. It hurt especially for Marie-Philip Poulin, the player who has carried Team Canada on her back from Olympics to World Championships and back, just as her Boston counterpart Hilary Knight has done for the U.S.

It hurt for the fans, especially the young ones, who have turned out in such numbers that Montreal was able to sell out the Bell Centre for a late-season tilt against Toronto. At Place Bell in Laval, they weren’t so fortunate.

The Montreal players will be seeing Boston goaltender Aerin Frankel in their nightmares for years. Frankel stopped 53 shots in Boston’s single-overtime victory in Game 1, then 56 shots in Game 2. By the end of that second game, the 5-foot-5 Frankel loomed like the Goodyear blimp in front of the Boston net. If there’s a way to beat her, the Montreal snipers need to find it and soon, or their season will end Tuesday night in Boston.

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The triple-overtime loss also came with some weird ice-time allocation on the part of Montreal coach Kori Cheverie, who chose to park some players for most of the very long evening while her stars played to exhaustion and beyond.

The discrepancies, pointed out by Karine Hains, a blogger for the Hockey Writers, were extreme: 61 minutes and 33 seconds on defence for Erin Ambrose and 56:49 for Kati Tabin; 12 seconds for Brigitte Laganière; 35 seconds for Madison Bizal and 5:56 for Catherine Daoust.

Up front, the story was much the same, with Kristin O’Neill, Laura Stacey and Marie-Philip Poulin all topping 50 minutes, while others had the best seat in the house. Did Cheverie’s very short bench hurt her team in a triple-overtime game? We’ll never know — but Boston coach Courtney Kessel distributed ice-time more evenly and won it.

The series is not over. If Montreal can get a couple of quick ones past Frankel it might rattle her confidence and lead to a flood of goals — but that might be like trying to sneak a pork chop past a wolf.

Win or lose, it’s been a terrific season for the league, the team, the stars, the fans. Officially, the PWHL is still three months away from its first birthday, a phenomenal start by any metric. And when the next season begins, these teams will all have monikers and writing about them will be much easier!

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Another week, another exit: In the Joey in Wonderland world of CF Montréal, we never go long without another controversy or another exit. With CF Montréal, every door is a revolving door.
This time it was sporting director Olivier Renard out the door last week, following what team president Gabriel Gervais described as “strategic differences” — reportedly a profound disagreement as to exactly how much homegrown midfield star Mathieu Choinière is worth to the club.

Choinière, the 2023 team MVP, has reportedly asked for a trade after negotiations on a new contract broke down — meaning negotiations with Joey Saputo broke down.

Renard reportedly wanted to pay Choinière the asking price, the club did not, exit Renard. In five years with the club, Renard helped build a contender that made a serious championship run under Wilfried Nancy, only to see it wrecked when Nancy bolted out of town, only to win a title with the Columbus Crew.

Meanwhile, the Montreal visit of galactic superstar Lionel Messi did not go off without its hitches, not all of them caused by price-gouging on the part of CF Montréal.

The bush league rule that kept Messi off the pitch for two minutes was simply ridiculous. Messi was, in effect, handed a penalty after he was injured by a foul that wasn’t called. Fans didn’t pay extortionate rates for tickets to see commissioner Don Garber play soccer.

Heroes: Juraj Slafkovsky, Kaiden Guhle, Artemi Panarin, Leon Draisaitl, Kaiden Guhle, Olivier Renard, Lionel Messi, S.J. Green, Chad Owens, Kendrick Lamar, Morales Williams, Ron Ellis &&&& last but not least, Aerin Frankel.

Zeros: MLSE, Brendan Shanahan, Kyle Dubas, John Tavares, Pierre-Luc Dubois, Joey Saputo, Alex Meruelo, Gary Bettman, Drake, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Rob Manfred, Bud Selig Jr., Claude Brochu, David Samson &&&& last but not least, Jeffrey Loria.

Now and forever.

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