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Toronto Maple Leafs' Tyler Bozak and Dion Phaneuf congratulate teammate Phil Kessel (centre) on his game winning goal against the Colorado Avalanche in NHL overtime action in Toronto on Tuesday October 14, 2014.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press

What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object?

Hockey's version of the age-old parable unfolded at the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday night, with regression's past meeting regression's future, and the question of who exactly would be outshot – in a meeting of teams that seem to always be – would finally be answered.

The Colorado Avalanche are the one NHL team marked to nose dive in the standings by hockey's calculator brigade; the Toronto Maple Leafs – well, they've already been to this show.

They didn't enjoy it. And they don't want to see it again.

The Leafs have made plenty of noise trying to fix what went wrong a year ago, when their season ended with a 12 losses in 14 games slide, but the Avs have not yet been burned and as a result haven't talked wholesale changes.

That could be coming, especially given coach Patrick Roy's worried expression on the bench all night.

The Leafs, you see, did the honours on the outshooting front on Tuesday. For the first time since last March, going back to last season's meltdown, Toronto got the better of an opponent there, 40-24.

More importantly, they won, taking overtime to get it done. Phil Kessel capped off a strong finish with a brilliant winner, where he raced down to a puck in the corner and outfoxed Avs defenceman Tyson Barrie with a deke only 34 seconds into the extra frame.

Final score: Leafs 3, Avs 2.

Score one for the outshooters.

Afterward, Leafs coach Randy Carlyle was asked if he liked his star's hustle on the winning play.

"I loved it," he said.

The thing was it was a fitting finish given the Leafs had dominated the late going, drawing penalty after penalty and overcoming a tentative start to overwhelm the Avs.

They outshot them 32-12 after the first period, pushing their possession at even strength to 55 per cent in one of their best showings ever in the more than two years with Carlyle as coach.

More impressively, they battled back after not getting breaks early.

After James van Riemsdyk and Ryan O'Reilly traded goals in the first, the Avs appeared as though they were going to pull out a lucky one, as they weathered three dangerous Leafs power plays before countering when Matt Duchene roofed his first of the season to pull his team ahead.

Rather than wilt, the Leafs came roaring back.

First, Joffrey Lupul – whose line has easily been Toronto's best in the first four games – grabbed a blooper of a dump out by Avs d-man Brad Stuart out of the air and quickly tied it.

Then Kessel created a glorious chance by dancing around a defender and nearly beating netminder Semyon Varlamov on a breakaway to put the game away.

All the while, the shots continued to ring up in the Leafs favour, a sign that either Colorado D is even more porous than advertised or Toronto's revised system is finally beginning to pay dividends.

Kessel's winner then added an exclamation point to what had been a storyline all game.

The Leafs pushed the pace. The Avs, playing on the second night of a back-to-back after winning in Boston, didn't.

"When we start coming at teams in waves, it puts a lot of pressure on them," Lupul said. "That's certainly what we did in the second half of the game."

Neither of these teams plays a possession game like the league's contenders; their specialty is a counterattack style that the Leafs – having bombed out at the end of last season – are trying to get away from but that the Avs have yet to give up on.

The analytics craze that's hit the NHL this season doesn't forecast much success for either given what happened a year ago. The Leafs finished with 84 points and that's about what they deserved, even with outstanding goaltending.

The Avs, meanwhile, were a 112-point team and have an awful long way to fall to drop out of the playoff race. A 20-point dip, however, isn't out of the question given how heavily they depended on Varlamov a year ago and the fact they lost Paul Stastny to St. Louis.

Where Colorado has the edge over the Leafs is in its incredible depth down the middle, with three young superstars at what's debatably the hardest position to find them right now in the NHL.

The rest, aside from Varlamov, they still need to figure out. And it may well take them a trying season to realize they even need to.

While the Leafs haven't found their answer down the middle, they are starting to have some semblance of them up front. Both the Nazem Kadri-led second line and the Mike Santorelli-led third were again strong, providing some excellent shifts to spell Kessel and Co. and wear down Colorado's D.

The fourth line hardly played (six shifts that amounted to little more than four minutes) and the first line again had some adventures in their own end, but the foundation for the better possession game the Leafs are looking for could be in there somewhere in at least six of their 12 forwards.

For one night anyway, Carlyle liked what he saw there – and this is the rare win his team can build off.

"That's imperative that you get the grind going," Carlyle said. "You want to grind as much as you can. That wear down type of hockey. Defending is difficult with the new rules, with no hooking, no holding, no impeding of progress.

"It's really difficult. If you're able to get people off of your back and control the puck, it can wear them down. We felt that that's really what we have to do a better job of as a hockey club. We talked about it and stressed it. By no means are we saying we're at it.

"But it's an aspect of our game that has to become part of our arsenal. A weapon for us."

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