Maybe the Canadiens should persuade the league to let them skip the second period of home games and just pay two 30-minute halves, interrupted by a single 30-minute intermission?

If you have to skip a period, you’d rather see a team start well and end well, but these second-period gap-outs are a mystery. Against St. Louis Sunday night, it cost them. Half the fans were probably stuck at concessions when Dylan Holloway scored 26 seconds into the second period to tie it 2-2 — then 39 seconds later, Pavel Buchnevich was left all alone in front of Jakub Dobes and that was the ball game. The Canadiens would mount their usual stirring third-period comeback, but this time it wasn’t quite enough.

Dobes must have felt there was a trap door in front of the net, the way the Blues kept popping up in

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