For a good chunk of their game on Wednesday against the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Flames were the second-best team. But they managed to recover from some early gaffes – and their reactions to said gaffes – and staged a third period comeback to grab a 3-2 victory on home ice.

The Flames were out-chanced (per Natural Stat Trick) 9-5 in the opening period – a product of them opening up their game a bit in reaction to going down a goal midway through the frame.

But they managed to make adjustments, reverting back to their patient style and figuring out ways to disrupt Columbus’ tight defensive zone checking.

“Instead of being patient early we opened up against them early, and they made us pay for it a couple times,” said interim head coach Geoff Ward. “But I thought we recovered well. I really liked our second, I liked our third, and I liked our overtime.”

The Flames are a team that has tended to thrive playing high octane, run and gun hockey. So it’s probably heartening for the group that they were able to get into the trenches and muck around and find a way to get some points in the type of game they’d often leave empty-handed in.

“The one thing about that is when they’re coming back through the middle as well as they do, if you’re trying to play an east-west game through it, it’s tough,” said Ward of the Jackets’ clogging the middle strategy. “You’ve really got to do a good job of close support, slashing through. I thought we got better at that as the game went on. We were able to get closer support through the middle of the ice and we were able to advance the puck. Even through it wasn’t necessarily tape-to-tape, we were able to be a little bit more territorial.”

The victory itself is two points that will be valuable for the Flames in the standings, but also potentially a template of the type of patient hockey they’ll need to be able to play (and win) if they want to be successful in the remaining 14 games – and beyond.

“Down the stretch the hockey is going to be like this the rest of the way, tight checking,” said Ward. “So for us it’s important that we have resolve as a team and it’s also very important that we just kept playing and after the first period we were patient and we just kept playing, and playing, and eventually we broke through.”

Who got the game-tying goal?

Following the game, there was a decent amount of good-natured ribbing between Flames captain Mark Giordano and alternate captain Matthew Tkachuk regarding who scored the game-tying goal.