SAN JOSE >> The San Jose Sharks aren’t that far off from being a winning hockey team. Or at the very least, a team that can win a hockey game.

But circumstances have conspired to keep them from winning an NHL game for 17 days and counting.

On Saturday night against the Calgary Flames, an exceptional play kept San Jose from tying the game. Down 2-1 early in the third period, Sharks forward Klim Kostin, making his return after two weeks away with an upper-body injury, found the puck near his stick on the right side of the Flames’ crease. Kostin looked to have an open net to score, as Calgary netminder Dustin Wolf was covering the far side of the goal.

But despite losing his stick, forward Blake Coleman, the closest Calgary player to the puck, laid his body out flat in the crease and obstructed Kostin’s easiest opportunity to score, preventing Kostin from connecting with the puck for a shot on net.

Once again, it was that kind of night for San Jose, which ultimately lost 3-1 after Jonathan Huberdeau scored a game-sealing empty-net goal with 0.4 seconds remaining.

“We just watched it,” said Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky after the game of Kostin’s chance. “Coleman sprawls out. Does a desperation (move), gets a piece of it.”

San Jose’s last win came on Dec. 12, when the Sharks beat St. Louis 4-3 in Missouri. It has been a perpetual state of misery for San Jose since then.

The Sharks’ latest loss was typically close and typically aggravating. Only Huberdeau’s last-second score, his second of the game, prevented San Jose from enduring its third defeat in four games by exactly one goal.

Overall, it was the Sharks’ seventh loss in a row. San Jose is in the midst of its longest losing streak since the beginning of the season, when the Sharks lost their first nine games.

“I was trying to reach to the puck and send it to the net,” Kostin said. “But their (defender) played well with his skates. A little bit unlucky. But it is what it is.”

That’s how it has been for the Sharks for weeks now. San Jose has shown that it can compete with any team in the NHL.

Beating them is another story.

“I liked our third period the best,” Warsofsky said of the period San Jose lost 1-0. “The first two were not good enough. Again, we can’t give up, I don’t know what it was, (33) shots. It’s too much.”

San Jose squandered a sterling performance by goaltender Yaroslav Askarov, who stopped 30 of the 32 shots on goal.