RALEIGH, N.C. – Margins are slim in the Stanley Cup Final. Game 2 between the Vegas Golden Knights and Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday night showed just how slim they can be.Seth Jarvis capped off an unhinged third period and overtime by scoring the game-winner to deliver a 4-3 victory to Carolina and tie the series 1-1. There were four goals in a span of just over nine minutes to end regulation, plus another goal waved off and an ensuing challenge that failed.With 10 minutes to play in the third period, the Golden Knights looked like they were on their way to a seventh straight playoff win, primed to return home to Las Vegas with a commanding 2-0 series lead and with a second consecutive sweep on the table. They led 2-0, and were strangling the Hurricanes’ offense with a smothering forecheck and impenetrable structure in their own end.The Lenovo Center was lifeless. The sold-out crowd watched in stunned silence as their top-seeded Hurricanes slogged their way through an uneventful start to the period, destined for their first consecutive losses since January.Then everything changed.It wasn’t a meltdown, filled with a slew of egregious errors. The Hurricanes only needed to find the slightest of cracks in the Golden Knights’ armor to turn the tide in their favor. Here’s how it all went down.It started with a faceoff in the Vegas zone with 9:48 left in the third period. William Karlsson won the draw cleanly behind his own net, where defenseman Rasmus Andersson collected it with momentum. It looked like it would be an easy zone exit, with plenty of ice in front of Andersson and with Mitch Marner flying up the boards to back off his defender and provide an outlet pass.Carolina’s Logan Stankoven chased Andersson down, and the Swedish defender made a costly decision. Rather than sending the puck up the boards, he stick-handled and cut back, hoping Stankoven would fly by. But it didn’t happen. The 5-foot-8, 165-pound winger bodied Andersson, stole the puck and wrapped it around the other side of the net.Even then, Vegas goalie Carter Hart got his skate onto the near-side post and would’ve saved a conventional wraparound stuff attempt. Stankoven’s backhand shot ramped up the stick of Vegas defenseman Jeremy Lauzon, under Hart’s right armpit and into the net.“We just stopped playing direct in some moments,” Marner said. “That’s what you have to do to stay successful, especially against this team.”Suddenly, the crowd was alive. The rally towels were waving, the building was rocking, and for the first time in more than four periods of hockey, the Hurricanes were playing on their toes.“The building got going,” Carolina captain Eric Staal said. “I think we just needed a spark, and Stanky did a great job getting us going. It’s a tough building to play in when it gets going like that, and the boys started feeling pretty good about themselves.”Carolina continued to push for the tying goal, and got it less than three minutes later when William Carrier made a sensational play to fight through a check and pass the puck to Mark Jankowski with speed in transition. Jankowski roofed his shot over Hart’s glove to tie the game 2-2.Again, it wasn’t a major breakdown in coverage or blatant turnover. Carolina flipped the puck harmlessly out of its zone, high in the air, and Carrier reached down to glove the puck. As he did, Lauzon checked him to the ice. Andersson, somewhat understandably, expected the chance to die there, but as he was falling to the ice, Carrier cleverly bumped the puck to Jankowski.It caught Andersson off-guard and flat-footed. Jakowski skated by him, and Andersson could only dive and reach his stick in desperation as Jankowski buried the shot into the net.In the blink of an eye, the entire complexion of the game, and series, had flipped.“We’re in the Stanley Cup Final. This was never going to be easy,” Marner said. “Like I said, we have to be a little smarter with some of our pucks there. It’s sometimes how the game goes.”For a moment, it looked as though Vegas had flipped momentum back in its favor when Ivan Barbashev wrapped the puck around the Carolina net and jammed it out from underneath goalie Frederik Andersen and into the net. The officials waved the goal off on the ice, but coach John Tortorella immediately challenged.After a review, the call on the ice stood.“The ruling on the play was goaltender interference,” NHL director of officiating Stephen Walkom said in a statement to a pool reporter. “He waved it (off) immediately. He believed that it was under the goalie and the Vegas player went after the puck and interfered with the goalie and his ability to freeze the puck and waved it off immediately.”Tortorella disagreed.“I saw a loose puck in front of Freddie,” he said. “Our player stabbed it, didn’t move the goalie and it goes through him into the other side. I’d challenge it 10 out of 10 times.”It’s easy to see why Tortorella challenged the play. It was incredibly close. A goal could’ve sealed the win and given his team a commanding 2-0 series lead. On top of that, his penalty kill had been stellar to that point, killing 11 straight penalties, including two in Game 2 without allowing as much as a scoring chance.Tortorella has preached aggression since taking over in Vegas. He stressed to his players that if they’re to make mistakes, they should be made in aggression. He followed his own advice, and this time it backfired.Staal tipped a shot by Shayne Gostisbehere past Hart 25 seconds later. It was the Hurricanes’ third goal on three shots, and gave them their first lead of the game.Vegas left Staal alone in front, but did it to get into the passing lanes to eliminate the lateral one-timer options. It’s a split-second decision that ended up being wrong, but it’s a penalty kill that had made all of the right moves for several games.“They brought it at the end of the game there,” Vegas defenseman Noah Hanifin said. “We had a two-goal lead and they started pressuring all over the ice. I thought all game we did a good job just creating battles along the walls and handling that. We just got away from it a little bit for a few minutes and they capitalized.”With the goalie pulled for the extra attacker in the closing minutes of regulation, Vegas captain Mark Stone tied the game by batting the puck out of the air and past Andersen.That stopped the bleeding for a moment — at least for as long as the intermission lasted, but the Hurricanes stormed out to begin overtime, earned a power play, and won the game with a blistering slap shot by Jarvis.This time, after getting burned by the shot from the point near the end of regulation, the Golden Knights collapsed their penalty kill to eliminate that option. Gostisbehere smartly chose to dish the pass this time, and it burned them the other way.“That’s how the game of hockey goes sometimes,” Marner said. “We just have to stay patient and do the things that we did going through those first two (periods). I thought we kind of just gave pucks away a little too much.”Through 50 minutes, the Golden Knights had played a brilliant defensive game. They were so close to heading home up 2-0, they could taste it. And while they’re a composed group, and said all of the right things after the game, there’s no doubt the ending was a gut punch.And it wasn’t the only blow they suffered on Thursday. Defenseman Brayden McNabb left the game after taking a slap shot to the face in the first period.It’s still early in the series, with plenty of hockey still to be played, but this felt like a missed opportunity. The Golden Knights had the Hurricanes pinned and let them up off the mat.