This wasn’t the way many envisioned this series shaking out. The play of Minnesota Wild superstar Kirill Kaprizov and the rest of the youngsters have the State of Hockey believing.

Kaprizov became the first player in Wild history with three career multigoal playoff games and the third Wild player to start a postseason with consecutive multipoint games, joining John Klingberg (2023) and Eric Staal, who had a record four assists in the first two games in 2020.

For as hard as the Wild battled, and as well as they played for stretches of their first-round series against the Vegas Golden Knights, the end result was an all-too-familiar one. Minnesota fell 3-2 in Game 6 at Xcel Energy Center on Thursday night, sealing its eighth consecutive first-round exit from the Stanley Cup Playoffs.