“From what I’ve seen through the season,” Edmonton Coach Kris Knoblauch said on the morning of Game 4, “how resilient they are, perseverance, their focus, their attitude, I’m really excited for the next 10 days.”

The next 10 days Knoblauch was referring to was the amount of time it would take to reach Game 7. And Knoblauch’s belief has been rewarded with three straight wins, capped by Friday night’s 5-1 decision at home to send the series to a winner-take-all decider Monday night in South Florida.

Only two teams in NHL history had previously come back from a 3-0 deficit to force a Game 7 in the finals; the last time it happened was 1945.

Stuart Skinner, considered the weaker of the two starting goaltenders heading into the series, again made the timely saves the Oilers needed as he stopped 20 of the 21 shots he faced. Sergei Bobrovsky made 16 saves for Florida.

The first period had more tension than action, with nerves appearing to affect the Panthers more than the hosts. The team playing with a chance to hoist the Cup for the third consecutive game looked disjointed and out of sorts, while Edmonton settled in fairly quickly.

Warren Foegele put the Oilers ahead at the 7:27 mark with a tap-in finish off a sublime pass from Leon Draisaitl, who was critical of his own performance in the series Friday morning. Draisaitl had just two assists entering Game 6, both of them from Edmonton’s 8-1 blowout win in Game 4, but his saucer pass to Foegele put on display his ability to slow the game down and pick out the perfect moment to strike.

Florida mustered just two shots on goal in the opening period, and one was more of a dump-in that happened to be corralled by Skinner than an actual threat to score. The Panthers were lucky to be down just one goal after a flat opening 20 minutes, but a mere 46 seconds into the second period, Adam Henrique finished off a two-on-one with Mattias Janmark to electrify the crowd and double Edmonton’s lead.

Aleksander Barkov appeared to halve the deficit for Florida just 10 seconds after Henrique’s goal, but the Oilers immediately challenged for offside. After a lengthy review, it was ruled that Sam Reinhart was offside five seconds before the goal, restoring Edmonton’s two-goal lead.

The Panthers found more of their game in the middle frame, but Edmonton’s defense locked down the middle of the ice — returning the favor of how Florida shut down the Oilers in the first three games — and kept them at bay. Late in the period, amid a promising shift for the Panthers, a shot from Gustav Forsling was blocked by Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and the rebound from the block sprung Zach Hyman on a breakaway.

Hyman, who scored 54 goals in the regular season and has 16 in 24 postseason games, calmly skated in on Bobrovsky and beat the sprawling netminder with an elevated backhand shot.

Barkov got the Panthers on the board 1:28 into the third period with a sharp move to the net that allowed him to smoothly tuck the puck past Skinner, but the tally didn’t spark a comeback for Florida.

The Oilers weathered a brief push from the Panthers after Barkov’s tally, then calmly defended their lead for the rest of the game. A power play to Florida early in the period proved fruitless as Edmonton’s impenetrable penalty kill again held strong, and the Panthers didn’t create much of a sustained threat after that.

Ryan McLeod’s empty-netter with 3:15 left sealed the victory and put the Oilers on the verge of making history. Darnell Nurse added a second empty-net goal 12 seconds later.

Entering Game 6, Edmonton was 4-0 in potential elimination games this season. The Oilers are now 5-0 and one win away — improbably, impossibly — from hoisting the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1990.