Vegas Ended Utah's First Playoff Run. Wednesday, Utah Walks Back Into the Building.

The last time Utah played a hockey game at T-Mobile Arena that mattered, it won. Game 2 of the first round, April 21: Mammoth 3, Golden Knights 2, in Vegas's own barn. Three nights later in Salt Lake City, Utah won again to lead the series 2-1, and a second-year franchise was one good week from eliminating the most experienced playoff team in the West.

Utah never won again. Vegas took Game 4 in overtime, Game 5 in double overtime, and Game 6 by 5-1 on May 1 to close the first playoff run in Mammoth history. The league's own autopsy of the series kept coming back to the same wounds: leads Utah could not hold — Vegas outscored the Mammoth 10-6 in third periods across the six games — a power play that went quiet, and a young team learning in public what the spring costs. Wednesday night (6:30 p.m. PT, TNT) is the first meeting since. It is a regular-season game in November. Nobody on either bench will treat it like one.

Vegas arrives home in form. The Golden Knights closed a four-game road trip on Sunday with a 4-1 win at Buffalo that started badly and ended in a rout: the Sabres outshot them 14-6 in a scoreless first period, and Adin Hill held the line until the game turned. Mitch Marner scored shorthanded, unassisted, at 12:17 of the second. Eighty-six seconds later, Jack Eichel scored the winner against the team that drafted him, in the building he used to call home. Buffalo got one back early in the third, and Tomas Hertl answered with two of his own — at 5:43 off a Marner feed, and at 10:00 off Ivan Barbashev and Shea Theodore — to finish it. Hill made 27 saves. The trip went 3-0-1, the only blemish a shootout loss at Boston on the first night, and Vegas comes home 12-5-2 with three straight wins.

Hertl is the name Utah's game plan starts with. He has a point in four straight games — four goals and two assists across the streak — and his nine goals are second on the Golden Knights. Marner, quiet by his standards early, is up to 20 points on three goals and 17 assists, and Sunday was his full toolkit in one afternoon: the shorthanded breakaway, then the setup for Hertl's first. Barbashev assisted on two goals. The three stars in Buffalo were Hertl, Marner and Barbashev, in that order, and all three are waiting on Wednesday.

Utah's trip went the other way. The Mammoth ended a six-game road swing with losses at Montreal and Ottawa, and the Montreal one will sting for a while: Logan Cooley scored a hat trick — his second in four games and the fifth of his career, in just 228 games, the fastest any active player has reached five — and Utah still lost 5-4 in overtime. At Ottawa on Saturday, Clayton Keller had a goal and an assist in a 4-2 loss. The Mammoth come in 10-7-1, holding the West's second wild card, with a last-10 record of 4-5-1 and a goal difference of exactly zero: 63 scored, 63 allowed. There is no fat on this team. It wins close or it loses close.

The comparison runs through the men who carry each attack. Keller leads Utah with 24 points, and 19 of them are assists — he is a winger playing point guard. Cooley's 11 goals lead the team, Schmaltz has nine with seven of them on a power play converting at 37 percent, and Sergachev has 20 points from the blue line. Vegas counters with depth Utah has to chase all night: Hertl's nine goals, Marner's 20 points, Eichel scoring winners in statement games, and a goaltender who just turned a 14-6 first-period shot deficit into a footnote. In the spring, the series turned on third periods and experience. Utah's counter is that its best players are a year older now, and Cooley is scoring in bunches nobody in the league is matching right now.

Wednesday also opens a stretch Vegas has circled. It is Military Appreciation Knight, the start of the club's Knights Hockey Week, and the first of five straight home games running through November 19. The building will be full, the game is on national television, and the visitors are the one team with a genuine grievance. Follow it in the Game Center.

The spring ended for Utah with a handshake line in its own rink after a 5-1 loss, two overtime defeats sitting in between. A November game cannot settle any of that. It is simply the first chance to answer it, in the building where the run started to slip.