This year's Wild team could be summed up almost perfectly by Sunday's 5-4 loss, with a lifeless 40 minutes to spot Dallas a four-goal lead in an elimination game at home, and then a frantic final surge that came within a half-inch or so of sending the game to overtime.
This team made you sorry you turned the TV on and just as sorry you turned it off.
What we shouldn't lose sight of, though, is this: this is an organization with a lot of flaws right now; the problems were there when the score was 4-0 and they were still there at 5-4. When I asked observers on Twitter what the single biggest problem facing this franchise is, the answers were so varied that a consensus is impossible.
Among them: they've overvalued their young players, signed free agents whose play is a notch below their pay grade, and the mix of the two has left them a level below elite teams while hard-pressed to improve because of salary cap woes. You could attribute that to general manager Chuck Fletcher.
They lack a pure goal scorer, and in this series against Dallas two of their closest approximations and two of their biggest free-agent splurges — Zach Parise and Thomas Vanek — were injured.
Beyond that, responses correctly delved into harder to define areas of mental toughness, leadership, the inability to have a sense of urgency until pressed and inconsistency.
If you've concluded that it's impossible to pick just one thing, you're not alone.
Veteran defenseman Ryan Suter and interim coach John Torchetti first pointed to inconsistency as the team's main problem when asked Sunday. Looking at all the team's losing and winning streaks this season — and the way the Wild can go from on fire at the end of Game 5 to sleep-skating to start Game 6 to electric at the end — this makes sense.