Wild readies for most difficult test yet as series shifts to Winnipeg

ST. PAUL -- The Wild has been at its best this season when it has seemingly faced some of its greatest adversity.
Despite a slow start to the season, fueled by a mountain of injuries to key players, Minnesota rallied to reach the Stanley Cup Playoffs for a sixth consecutive season.
Now that its there, the Wild will be tasked with its stiffest test yet.

Minnesota lost 2-0 in Game 4 to the Winnipeg Jets on Tuesday at Xcel Energy Center, giving the Jets a 3-1 series lead with a chance to close out its division rival Friday night at Bell MTS Place.
Winnipeg has been the best home team in the NHL this season and is 2-0 there so far in this series, but Minnesota must find a way, yet again, to mount a rally.
"We don't have a choice," said Wild goaltender Devan Dubnyk, who was rock solid again in Game 3, making 26 saves. "We have to win one hockey game. That's all it comes down to now. We were going to have to win a game in their building anyway, so it's going to have to be next game. We go in there with the mindset that this is far from over, and we're fully capable of coming back. The only way to do that is to win the next one."
Having that mindset is the only option the Wild has at this point.

It's not unprecedented for teams to rally from 3-1 deficits; heck, the Wild did it twice during its magical 2003 run to the Western Conference Finals.
But those runs aren't easy, and they don't come by looking at the entirety of the hill it has to climb.
"You can't start look at the hill you have to climb overall - that's not how you have to approach it. It's next game," Dubnyk said. "We have to win one hockey game in Winnipeg and we're more than capable of doing that."
The Wild proved that it's capable of at least competing north of the border. It led in the third period of Game 1 last week, and was within one goal of tying Game 2 late as well.
Dubnyk said the Wild feels much better about its game now than it did when it was in Winnipeg for those games last week. That confidence will be put to the test.
"It's going to be important to take the way we were playing these last two games into Winnipeg and work as hard as we can and see what happens. I'm not concerned about that," Dubnyk said. "There's no quit in this group. We're going to work as hard as we can to get one and then we'll shift our focus again."
Minnesota was dealt another big blow earlier in the day on Tuesday when it learned that forward Zach Parise is
week-to-week with a fractured sternum
, an injury that will almost certainly knock him from the remainder of this series and perhaps the next, if the Wild can stage a rally.
Parise, who was tied for fourth in the NHL with 10 goals in the month of March and had one goal in each of the first three games of this series, was playing his best hockey of the year and providing the Wild with invaluable offensive production from the second line.

"We've had a lot of things like this happen to us all year," said Wild coach Bruce Boudreau. "They'll regroup. We have two days off here, and when this team has some time off, they respond."
Boudreau said he learned of Parise's injury on Monday, and immediately felt bad for the player. Parise, who missed the first half of the season following microdiscectomy surgery, had worked hard to round his game back into top form, and was
surging at exactly the right time
.
Navigating the mountain in front of it without Parise and top defenseman Ryan Suter only adds to the difficulty, but the Wild has no choice but to give it its best shot. It doesn't have time to sulk about the potentially devastating losses to its lineup.
"We've been going through adversity the whole season with injuries so we're just gonna bounce back; that's what we do," said Wild forward Mikael Granlund. "Bottom line is we need to win the next one. We have a couple days off and we gotta lick our wounds and get ready for the next one. This is far from over."

Related:
- Postgame Hat Trick: Jets 2, Wild 0 - Watch: Boudreau's postgame comments - Game 4 highlights - Parise week-to-week with fractured sternum - Playoff Central - Watch: Postgame thoughts from the locker room