Sabres’ Game – Buffalo’s season ended with a 3-2 Game 7 loss to the Montreal Canadiens, a gutting overtime setback that featured a 72nd-minute goal by Alex Newhook. But the deeper story is harder to dismiss: the Sabres produced their best team in 19 years, jumped from 79 to
On a late Monday night that already feels like Tuesday, the Buffalo Sabres’ Game 7 defeat still sits in the room like a closing door.
Inside the home room, goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen’s eyes are as red as the lamp Alex Newhook lit behind his net in the 72nd minute of Game 7, the final game of the Canadiens’ season. A giant, stuffed buffalo head hangs on the wall. The atmosphere is quiet enough to feel like a morgue.
“It just sucks. It stings. It sucks. I dunno,” Luukkonen said.
The scoreboard is merciless: Montreal won 3-2 in Game 7 to advance to the conference final, where the Canadiens will face the Carolina Hurricanes.
And for Buffalo, the sting has a specific shape. The Sabres scored nine of the series’ final 12 goals and dominated the Canadiens in every offensive category in Game 7—shots, attempts, chances, high dangers, and expected goals—except for the one number that actually decides everything.
The deciding moment came from Newhook. He pulled a puck on a low-reward rush, slipped defenseman Rasmus Dahlin into a screen, and whipped a knuckle puck that dipped just under Luukkonen’s glove and over his left pad.
After the game, before he shook hands and saluted fans and answered the tough questions, Luukkonen threw chunks of his equipment down the hallway.
Dahlin didn’t dress it up. “It comes down to small things. They got the bounces,” he said. “F—— sucks.
“One shot decides the whole season. It sucks.”
That sentence lands differently because of what Buffalo had been building all year—a version of the franchise that. for the first time in 15 years. felt not just competitive but genuinely good.. For a city that had lived inside playoff absence for 14 straight seasons, the pain in Game 7 is unmistakable.. But so is the relief that something had finally clicked.
Buffalo had just scored. It had just tied the game. KeyBank Center jolted to life when Dahlin found the back of the net with a snipe in the third period, setting off the kind of noise that arrives before a goal song can even do its job. It felt like the momentum had finally turned over.
Tage Thompson gave voice to what many in the building were thinking as the final minutes unfolded. “I don’t think anyone in this room felt like we were done yet,” he said. “I thought we played a really good game, which makes it even tougher.
“Luuk played great. Keeps it tight for us. Pull our way back into it and felt like we had all the momentum. Just couldn’t score.”
The Sabres came into Game 7 with a storyline that was statistical as well as emotional. No team in the Eastern Conference had scored more often than Buffalo, which piled 326 goals between the regular season and playoffs. A 327th goal would’ve kept them alive.
It didn’t happen.
Even so, this wasn’t a season that deserves to be reduced to a single swing of the puck in a single game.
Before the conference-qualifying reality set in, Buffalo had already grabbed the attention of anyone willing to pay close enough attention.. They finished the year with 109 points after jumping from 79 year-over-year—their most since 2007.. They ousted the Bruins and pushed the Canadiens to a series that ended with the Canadiens winning Game 7 3-2.. Buffalo also finished top five after years of drafting top five.
The pain is real. It has to be, because the expectation had shifted—right when a franchise that never had the luxury of expecting much finally started giving it to fans for the first time in years.
Coach Lindy Ruff spoke directly to what this group represented, even in defeat. “This is a giant step for us. A giant step for all the players to really get a feel what it’s really like to be proud of being a Buffalo Sabre, to be proud of playing here,” he said.
“You know, when I took the job, I thought No. 1 was I wanted these guys to like being a Buffalo Sabre. I think they like being a Sabre, and I think they did our city proud. It wasn’t the result we wanted, and to a man they’re all disappointed, but they gave me everything you had in their tank.”
The drought mattered, and so did the rebound. Buffalo’s playoff run wasn’t supposed to look like this. It didn’t feel like a lucky run built on smoke. It felt like progress that kept showing up, even when it had reasons not to.
Ruff will remember resilience, too. “This was a team that they never quit. And they probably had every excuse to at times, but they always found a reason to win,” he said.
He also pointed to the kind of energy Buffalo finally got to experience—an atmosphere players don’t forget.. “The energy around our team. around the city. in this building. outside the building. this was the first time our players got to experience something like this.. And I couldn’t be more proud of the way our city represented themselves with our play.”
Thompson framed it in the language of pressure and grind, the kind that follows a team all season long and only later gets translated into wins. “I don’t think you get to this spot, especially the way we started the season, without a group of brothers that want to go to war for each other,” he said.
“You’re going to face doubt and hate, and a bunch of noise all year long, especially in the position we were in. And the only way to get through that is to lean on each other.
“We did that all year.. We leaned on each other hard.. A lot of hard work went into this season by everyone that lot of people don’t get to see.. A lot of adversity and a lot of challenges.. The physical and mental grind that we went through to get here is why it hurts so bad.. Felt like we should have got rewarded for it a little bit more.”
There are paths that ruin seasons. Buffalo didn’t take one. It dug out of a self-inflicted October hole, handled the more veteran Bruins in Round 1, and pushed the Canadiens to the edge. That’s why the ceiling of what this team did matters even as the floor of what it didn’t do—advance—still stings.
The summer will bring a new kind of realism.. Local man Alex Tuch. who failed to register a point in this series. is an impending unrestricted free agent. and Buffalo will need to deal with what he’ll cost to keep.. Zach Benson and Peyton Krebs are both restricted and in need of raises.. Still, the bulk of Buffalo’s core is locked up, most at reasonable if not favourable rates.. GM Jarmo Kekalainen has cap space and momentum on his side.
But momentum is not a guarantee.
Thompson made it clear what the team now owes itself. “The way we were playing, I think everyone in the room felt like we were winning that game,” he said. “We just gotta, unfortunately, take that taste with us into the summer and do something about it.”
The only cure for this kind of pain is winning—no euphemisms, no shortcuts.
Ruff said he told the team to feel it, even if it doesn’t make the loss easier. “I told the team it hurts,” he said. “That pain will go away. But I won’t let this one game define the season we had.”
Buffalo Sabres Montreal Canadiens Game 7 Alex Newhook Rasmus Dahlin Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen Tage Thompson Lindy Ruff Carolina Hurricanes Jarmo Kekalainen NHL playoffs