COLUMBUS, Ohio >> The event itself at Ohio Stadium was great. The atmosphere was electric all day around the area, and how the Red Wings and Columbus Blue Jackets honored the memories of Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau was first-class.

The NHL put on a fabulous Stadium Series event, with 94,571 fans watching a hockey game outdoors.

But the final result is still of the utmost importance. Coach Todd McLellan made a valid point earlier in the week when he said when the Wings wake up Sunday morning, it’ll be about the points and what came out of the weekend that’ll be most important.

For the Wings, it was an empty weekend. Two consecutive losses to Columbus, including Saturday’s 5-3 defeat, enabled the Blue Jackets to leapfrog the Wings into the first wild-card position. The Wings held the second wild-card spot by two points Sunday morning over Boston and Ottawa, but several teams are now breathing down the Wings’ necks.

“We talked about, like, whatever the result was going to be, as long as we had a good effort, we should cherish what we just went through here,” McLellan said. “It’s a really unique experience. It was an incredible night. The league, the city of Columbus, the Blue Jackets deserve a lot of credit for the way they put this game on. It was really smooth and first class all the way through. The fans got a hell of a game to watch, and we’ll all tell those stories 10 years from now.

“But you’d love to end that story by saying, ‘Oh, by the way, we won,’ and we can’t do that now. We played well enough to win, but we have work to do managing it.”

After Alex DeBrincat’s second goal, and 29th of the season, tied the game 3-3, the Jackets broke the tie 67 seconds later.

Justin Danforth split between Simon Edvinsson and Albert Johansson and scored on his own rebound past goaltender Cam Talbot. Danforth appeared to high-stick Edvinsson as he skated through, but no call was made, though a referee saw it plainly.

“I got a stick up in my face. I won’t comment anything more on that,” Edvinsson said.

McLellan mostly sidestepped the apparent penalty, and said the play shouldn’t have mattered, what with two Wings defensemen there to kill the sequence before it could have developed.

For many fans on social media, these two losses to Columbus bore a painful resemblance to last season, when the Wings suffered a brutal seven-game losing streak which stung the Wings in the standings and played a part in them missing the playoffs on the final game of the season by a tiebreaker.

Captain Dylan Larkin, who rebounded from a subpar game Thursday, believes the Wings learned from last season’s late-season slide.

“We’ve been there before, and there’s experience we gained through that,” Larkin said. “We control our own destiny. We played well (Saturday); we deserved better.”

If the Wings are to end an eight-year playoff drought, it won’t be easy. They have the toughest remaining schedule in the NHL in terms of win percentage, and 13 of the final 22 games (including five of the final six) are on the road.

McLellan doesn’t want the Wings to be focusing on any of that right now, but rather how to better manage games. It’s a characteristic the Wings haven’t yet mastered.

“We’ve gone on two, seven-game winning streaks, kind of seen it all in 26, 27 games,” said McLellan, of the span since he took over Dec. 26. “But I do believe we have work to do in understanding the ebbs and flows of a game, the ups and downs, the situations of when we should swing for the fences and sometimes we should just punt and defend a little bit. We’re caught in between a few times.

“There’s a huge difference between playing on your toes and being aggressive and being impatient. We got a little impatient at times (Saturday).”

The Wings were off Sunday and resume practice Monday with the Carolina Hurricanes visiting Little Caesars Arena Tuesday (7 p.m./FDSNET/97.1) for the first of three games between the teams the rest of this season. It’ll be a chance to wipe away some of the frustration from an eventful, yet disappointing, weekend.

“Everyone wanted it (victory) on the bench for each other; the vibes are great,” forward Patrick Kane said of Saturday’s near comeback. “But we just didn’t get it done. Obviously we need to be better in those game-winning type situations to make a play here or there, play it safe and make sure we’re at least getting a point in those situations.

“Especially when you come back, it’s almost even more disheartening to lose that way.”