From that point on, the next 26 minutes saw the Sabres welcome back Coyotes goalie Anti Raanta - playing his first game since Oct. 12 - with a series of odd-man rushes. Griffith scored on a 3-on-1 rush before the end of the second period, Kane scored shorthanded to open the third and then Pouliot's second goal of the night gave them a 5-1 lead with 8:48 remaining.
Then, the comeback began.
"I don't think we panicked," Pouliot said. "Maybe we just thought the game was over before it was over."
Rinaldo scored less than a minute after Pouliot's second goal to make it 5-2. Less than two minutes after Rinaldo's goal, Cousins crashed the net and scored on a rebound. The Coyotes finally came within one when Dvorak scored with 51.7 seconds remaining, prompting an Arizona timeout.
Through it all, Lehner said the Sabres never felt panicked on the ice. They finally sealed the victory when Johan Larsson cleared a loose puck from the crease in the game's dwindling seconds.
"I just thought we needed to bear down and make the right decisions," Housley said. "We got away from what made us successful and we shot ourselves in the foot, but obviously we'll take the win."
Plus, even if it wasn't always pretty, a five-goal outing may have been just what the doctor ordered for a team that had been struggling to bury its chances as of late.
"We hope so," Pouliot said. "We hope it does. There's still a lot of things that we need to be better at in terms of the structure of our game, like at the end we kind of got away from it. But hopefully it gives us a big boost of confidence offensively and we've just got to do the job defensively too. "