MONTREAL — Martin St. Louis has long dreamed of the day his Montreal Canadiens would be so fine-tuned, so connected, so clear in their identity and their brand of hockey, that the team would essentially coach itself.He would set guidelines and standards, but they would be maintained by his players.The Canadiens have gotten there at points this season, points when St. Louis would look at what was happening on his bench and see the players doing what he’s been grooming them to do, self-correcting, self-regulating, ensuring everyone is on board.It is a sign of maturity.Maturity is what the Carolina Hurricanes have, and they have been building it for the better part of a decade. Their leaders — Jordan Staal, Jaccob Slavin and Sebastian Aho chief among them — have been playing under head coach Rod Brind’Amour throughout his tenure, and they regulate that dressing room, they ensure everyone falls in line and plays the way the Hurricanes play, a physically and mentally demanding style that applies intense pressure all over the ice at all times, even on the penalty kill.Because if even one player does not play that way, the whole thing falls apart.“Every day I’ve been here, we’ve never had that issue,” Brind’Amour said Tuesday. “Our leadership group is like, ‘This is how we do it.’ It’s nothing that’s coming from me. OK, I lay it out, but they have to buy into it. When I talk about the leadership group that I have, I’m just very fortunate because they’ve been here with me the whole time, and when I talk about (Staal), (Slavin) and (Aho), they don’t allow it to happen.”To Brind’Amour, hockey maturity comes down to decision-making, foregoing hope plays for sure things, calculating risk on the fly and landing on the right side of that calculation more often than not. St. Louis sees maturity much the same way, except he refers to it — almost every single day — as playing the game that’s in front of you, or doing what the game is asking you to do, or some version of that same theme.Essentially, decision-making.Following a 3-2 overtime loss in Game 3 and again on Tuesday, St. Louis referenced the maturity of his team’s game, and both times he mentioned the Canadiens will never be able to catch up to the Hurricanes in that department.“I think that comes with maturity and we’re going to have to — we’ve shown great maturity throughout the season,” St. Louis said. “We’re playing a very mature team. I don’t know if we can match that maturity, but I think we need to elevate ours a little bit, and I feel we have all the tools.”For the Canadiens, however, that maturity can, and must, manifest itself in different ways from the Hurricanes, who have a uniform playing style that never changes no matter the circumstances. It is less about playing the game in front of you than it is dictating what the game looks like.Baked into playing the game in front of you is an ability to adapt, to take an opponent’s weaknesses and incorporate elements into your own game to exploit those weaknesses.The Canadiens have not done that for two games. They have essentially played into the Hurricanes’ hands, turning pucks over at both blue lines, getting bogged down on breakouts, failing to clear pucks and generally defending much more than they’d like.One example of a way the Canadiens like to play but might need to change is the priority they place on possession. They have a tendency to move the puck backwards in order to ensure possession and get organized rather than instantly heading north. The problem with that against the Hurricanes is that they don’t give you time to get organized, and moving the puck backwards only helps them remove that time.“I think it’s a balance,” St. Louis said on his team’s possession game. “I think they’re not going to give you tons of pockets, but when we get those pockets you’ve got to execute through it. When we do that, there’s something good on the other side of that. You can’t get stubborn. It’s OK to give up possession to go get it back. I think it’s a balance, and to me, it’s playing the game that’s in front of you. So you can’t have your mind made up, I want to possess this puck.“The game’s going to tell you what to do.”This is the challenge the Canadiens face now, a young group coming off consecutive losses for the first time in these playoffs, trailing a series after three games for the first time in these playoffs. The two Game 4 situations they’ve played at home thus far have been an opportunity to go up 3-1.This Game 4 is the opposite of that. It is an experience they had in last year’s playoffs against the Washington Capitals, a series they lost in five games. It is not necessarily a must-win in the sense their season is not on the line, but it’s close.And to get the result in Game 4, the Canadiens will need to adjust, and they will need to mature.You can’t entirely make up a maturity deficit measured in years in a span of 48 hours. But the Canadiens will have to close that gap as much as possible, and they will do so by making better decisions with the puck, by being less stubborn with it.They will have to do what the game tells them to do.