DENVER — This wasn’t angry Nathan MacKinnon. This was disappointed Nathan MacKinnon. Disappointed with his team’s execution, the way they mishandled the puck, the way they played into the Vegas Golden Knights’ transition game with hesitant passes. This was a blown opportunity, no doubt about it, but there was no fire in the eyes, no disgust in his voice.This was a shrug, a mildly annoyed shrug. It’s one game, one measly game, and it takes four to move on to the Stanley Cup Final. And everyone in that room knows it’s a heck of a tall order to take four out of seven from the Colorado Freaking Avalanche.So there was no real sense of angst in the home dressing room at Ball Arena after the Golden Knights swiped home-ice advantage with a 4-2 victory in Game 1 of the Western Conference final on Wednesday night. This is anything but an emotionally brittle group.“(It’s) what we’ve done all year,” goaltender Scott Wedgewood said. “We bounce right back.”But have they really? Sure, eight of these guys — nine if you count Cale Makar, whose absence was felt up and down the lineup in this one — played in Colorado’s Cup-clinching game in 2022. But it’s been a minute. This is a team that opened the season with a mind-boggling 31-2-7 record and led the Central Division and the NHL wire-to-wire. A team that swept the Los Angeles Kings in the first round, then raced out to a 2-0 series lead against the Minnesota Wild before winning that series in five games.More than eight months into the season, a simple 1-0 series deficit is the first real adversity — if you can even call it that — this team has faced. Now it’s Colorado that has to win four out of six against a Vegas team whose confidence is growing by the day. These aren’t the overmatched Kings, trying to slog their way to a fortunate bounce in overtime. These aren’t the embryonic Wild, still developing into a long-term contender. Vegas is a championship team in its own right, with its own roster bursting with Cup winners. The romp stops here.And the Golden Knights punched the Avalanche in the mouth. So what are they going to do about it?“It’s not like we haven’t lost games this year and bounced back,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said. “I think getting a clear look at the game, us playing them, we’ll be able to give our guys some direction on how to be better. And we’ve done that. Our team has implemented (adjustments) quickly, and we bounce back. I have a lot of belief in our group. I’m not panicking about it. But the next game is obviously a big game.”It sure is. The last thing the Avalanche want is to go down 2-0 heading down to T-Mobile Arena. And while the Avs are justified in being calm and confident, if you squint hard enough, you can start to see some cracks in the plot armor that’s had Colorado scripted to the Final since that staggering start to the season.There’s Makar’s apparent upper-body injury, for one. The Avalanche talked in the morning about filling Makar’s skates by committee, but that’s far easier said than done. Makar is one of the five or six best hockey players on the planet, and with all due respect to the 5-foot-8 AHL/NHL tweener, Jack Ahcan is not. Ahcan saw just nine shifts in Game 1, as Makar’s minutes were shouldered by Devon Toews (who played 27 minutes, 32 seconds), Brett Kulak (23:06), Sam Malinski (20:10) and Josh Manson (19:02), all of whom stretched beyond their usual usage.And it showed. Without Makar directing traffic from up top, MacKinnon’s line was a shell of its usual self, with Bednar resorting to replacing Martin Nečas with Artturi Lehkonen in the third period. Vegas scored on the Makar-less penalty kill, and it took a pulled goalie late in the game for the Makar-less power play to solve Carter Hart and the Vegas PK.Makar is simply irreplaceable. And while he skated on his own before Wednesday’s morning skate, he’s clearly dealing with an injury that’s nagging enough to have been bothering him since Game 1 against Minnesota, and serious enough that it kept him out of a conference final game. That’s a concern.“He’s an important player, right?” Bednar said. “And he plays a lot. Some of the areas that we struggled with tonight, those are his strengths, right? Yeah, it affects (us). He’s out there a lot with the MacKinnon line. There’s definitely a trickle-down effect to that. But he’s not playing, so we have to find a way.”Then there’s the goaltending. It’d be folly to lay this loss at Wedgewood’s feet, but series like this one often come down to which goalie makes the extra big save, and Hart outdueled Wedgewood in Game 1. Wedgewood made great stops on Keegan Kolesar and Tomáš Hertl early, but he should have had Dylan Coghlan’s wrister from the high slot that opened the scoring. One soft goal between the legs can be the difference at this stage.Wedgewood and Mackenzie Blackwood — the Lumberyard, as they’re known in these parts — have been a terrific story this season, winning the Jennings Trophy as the league’s stingiest duo. But the fact is, Wedgewood is a 33-year-old career backup who’s never come close to playing this many games in a season, and Blackwood had all of seven games of postseason experience in eight years coming into this tournament. Neither has ever been in this situation. Rock-solid as they’ve been all season, they’re still untested, unproven. That, too, has to be a concern.And what of the fact that this is the second straight game in which the Avalanche have fallen behind 3-0? Are they getting sloppy? Overconfident? Complacent? Perhaps that’s a little melodramatic, but the Avalanche’s bar is extremely high, and they’re suddenly not meeting it.“We just weren’t sharp,” MacKinnon said. “Execution was poor from everybody. Just gotta be sharper than that.”Of course, Colorado rallied from that 3-0 deficit in Game 5 against the Wild in one of the most memorable games in franchise history, with MacKinnon scoring a signature goal to send the game to overtime. And they almost did it again on Wednesday night, with MacKinnon all but breaking Brayden McNabb’s ankles on a spectacular stop-and-go move in the corner before feeding Gabriel Landeskog for a power-play goal that drew Colorado within 3-2 with 2:21 to go.Even without Makar. Even after “fading away” for 20 minutes. Even with all that poor puck play, all those turnovers, all those disjointed shifts and one-and-dones and odd-man rushes against.Even in defeat, the Avalanche looked scary. And even down 3-0, they believed they would win. They always believe they’ll win.“Oh yeah, for sure,” Landeskog said. “We had that belief the whole game, really. And going into the third, even though they got one early after our power play, we still had lots of belief. We just did it (against Minnesota).”Now they have to do it again. The deficit is smaller, just 1-0, but the opponent, and therefore the challenge, is greater. There are all the reasons in the world to believe the Avalanche can and will do it. But for the first time in a long time, for the first time since the first drop of the puck back in October, there’s just enough reason to wonder, too.“We’re capable of more and capable of better,” Bednar said. “It just wasn’t there for us tonight. Gotta make sure it is for Game 2.”