MONTREAL — As the Bell Centre crowd rained down faux cheers, boos and chants of “Shoot the puck,” what was unfolding on the ice somehow became uglier and uglier for the home side in Game 4.Already heavily outshot all series, this was something else, with the Montreal Canadiens unable to generate a single shot on net for most of the third period, despite trailing 3-0 and score effects typically coming into play.By the end of the night, they had generated so few quality opportunities on the Carolina Hurricanes that they had just 14 percent of the game’s expected goals, making this not only the most lopsided game of the entire postseason — for any team — but the second most lopsided game of 2025-26, regular season included.If you factor in the careless penalties, bad breakouts and continuous turnovers, all of it screams of a team that simply has no answer for its relentless opponent in this Eastern Conference final. And the notion that the Canadiens can win even one more game — let alone the three straight it would take to win the series — feels completely fanciful.Credit to Jakub Dobeš — the Habs rookie netminder who has been their best player all postseason and their only significant contributor in this series — for coining a new description for just how far back they’ve fallen from being “in” this one after Wednesday’s 4-0 shellacking.“We’ve been an underdog this season and whole playoffs, so we’re a super underdog right now,” Dobeš said. “We’ll go to Carolina and try to win Game 5. Try to win Game 6. And hopefully we’ll get to Game 7.”His head coach, however, cautioned against contextualizing the challenge like that, making it bigger than it has to be in this difficult moment. With the Canadiens having now lost three straight games, being completely dominated territorially and having played a lot more hockey than the Canes, they can’t afford to think about more than survival on Friday night back in Raleigh, N.C.After being a terrific Cinderella story all year, their season is on the line yet again, and it’s nearly midnight.“You can’t look at it like a mountain,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis, who played for multiple teams that came back from down 3-1 in a playoff series during his career and used that experience in a passionate postgame speech to his team. “It’s one game. I think I’ve done it two or three times. The other side of that is incredible. It’s one game.”The odds are obviously against his team right now. While NHL teams have come back from 3-1 series deficits 32 times in league history, it’s happened just once in this round in 73 tries.If anything, the Canadiens’ ability to beat the Hurricanes seems to be further removed from reality with each game, with Carolina learning and adapting to their inexperienced opponent with every opportunity to wear them down. Montreal punched the Canes in the mouth by jumping out to a 4-1 lead in the opening minutes of Game 1, but since then, it’s been mostly Carolina, with Dobeš the biggest reason Game 2 and 3 made it to overtime.Anything can happen, obviously, in this league. You don’t have to look further than the Western Conference final, where no one had the Vegas Golden Knights sweeping a first-place Colorado Avalanche team that had the fifth-best regular season in the salary cap era. And Dobeš has shown the ability to steal games all postseason, as he did in winning Game 7 over the Tampa Bay Lightning in Round 1, while his team posted a record-low nine shots on goal.That type of heroic performance may be what it will take, however, given how the Habs seem to be coming apart at the seams. Down 3-0 after an awful first period, they then took four consecutive, unnecessary penalties, including two crosschecks to the head of Hurricanes forwards in front of the net.The frustration of being down by three and not having the puck most of the game — and the series, frankly — was evident with a lot of those misdeeds, and that lack of discipline can’t happen if the Canadiens are going to hang on and win Game 5. They’re going to have to be nearly perfect to beat this Hurricanes machine, a hardened veteran group that has been this deep in the playoffs so many times and learned so many hard lessons that they’re now making this beatdown look easy.The reality is the deck was stacked against Montreal coming in, given they are one of the youngest teams in the NHL and were coming off two difficult seven-game series in a stacked division. All of these games and this experience are found money for the franchise and its young players, with the upside being that, even if they lose this series in five games, they can take solace that so many other great teams with loads more experience have been bettered in this way.In fact, they’re playing one of them right now. This Carolina team is a leveled-up version of the ones that were wiped out in short series in years past, becoming better by going through the wars the Canadiens are just now stepping into for the first time.“The game’s going to humble you,” explained St. Louis, himself an undrafted 5-foot-8 winger who didn’t make the NHL full-time until age 25, yet was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. “Whenever you get humbled, you just stand tall. It’s not fun to hear that (mocking chants from the fans). But they’re not wrong …“You’ve got to be mentally strong. You’ve got to believe. You’ve got to believe that you actually can do it. I don’t doubt. I believe that we can do it.”Right now, St. Louis’ young charges believe it, too. Even when the results on the ice say they shouldn’t. This isn’t a team that has given up, even if they’re overmatched and likely about to bow out.And that says good things about where they’ll get to. Eventually.“He’s done it twice. If Marty can do it, we can do it,” Dobeš said, referencing his coach’s inspirational message about being down three games to one. “We are ready for it. I know how our group reacts to these situations. I feel like our best hockey comes when our back is against the wall, so I feel like this is going to be exciting.“Yeah, it sucks right now, but tomorrow is a new day. We’ll be an amazing group full of exciting people, have a great time on the plane, we’ll go for a team dinner, we’ll joke around, and we’ll bring our best hockey for Game 5. We’ll promise we’ll try our best to bring it home for Game 6.”With that, Dobeš explained he was going to head home and have some cake with his mother and younger brother, Zdenek, who were visiting from the Czech Republic for not only this game but another key celebration. It was his 25th birthday — and that was something worth taking a moment for, even after a loss.“Twenty thousand people came for my birthday,” Dobeš said, smiling.He certainly didn’t sound like someone who was ready to stop playing.