Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.
Leading 2-1 after a very strong opening period in Game 3 Tuesday night at the Sleeman Centre, the Guelph Storm had a complete collapse to start the second period, with the Sarnia Sting scoring four times in the opening 9:11 of the period.
They made it five goals in 11:19 as Guelph couldn't stop the freight train.
The end result was an 8-4 loss and a 3-0 deficit in the best-of-seven series. Game 4 goes Thursday night at 7 p.m.
A crowd of 4,548 took in the game.
"We just got away from our game a little bit and it shows that they're a good team, they capitalize when you don't play the game the right way," Storm captain Cooper Walker said of the fateful second period.
"A lot of energy in this rink today, the fans were great, and it gave us a boost off the opening draw in the first period, we've just got to carry that through the rest of the game."
Guelph led 2-0 early on goals by Isaac Enright and Ben McFarlane, backed by some outstanding goaltending by Brayden Gillespie.
But it all unfolded in that nine minutes from hell the next period.
Bad bounces, bad goals, bad penalties, bad decisions. It was a buffet of badness.
"The train just got off the track for seven or eight minutes in the second period," Storm coach Chad Wiseman said.
"We became undisciplined: undisciplined from a penalty standpoint, undisciplined from a structural standpoint and they've got a lot of offence. They can score in bunches and they did that.
"A lot of it's self-inflicted. At the end of the day you have to be accountable for your actions," Wiseman said.
Sarnia, with eight NHL draftees in the lineup, is just too big, too strong, too experienced and too deep offensively for the Storm.
Seven different Sting players scored on the night, with Sandis Vilmanis the only two-goal getter. Twelve different players had at least one point.
Gillespie, so good in the first, was pulled after the fifth Sarnia goal, He made 13 saves on 18 shots.
Guelph had 31 shots on Sarnia's Ben Gaudreau.
Guelph made things interesting in the third, with Jake Karabela and Matt Poitras scoring in the first five minutes to make it a 6-4 game.
But a Storm turnover just inside the Sarnia blueline led to an odd-man rush the other way and a 7-4 lead to squish any momentum.
An empty-netter iced the scoring.
The Storm power play continues to struggle, going 0-for-4 on the night. It's now one for 18 in the series.
Guelph now faces a seemingly insurmountable task of winning four straight.
"It's a mental grind ... you have to find a way. It's a cliche, but it's one game at a time and one period and one shift at a time. We have to find a way to extend the series, that's our focus," Wiseman said.
