ST. LOUIS _ After two somnolent periods, which were part of four ineffective offensive games, the Blues scored two goals in 11 seconds _ as many goals as they had scored in the 10 previous periods combined _ gave the lead away and then rallied to beat Florida 4-3 on Tuesday at Enterprise Center.
Brayden Schenn scored the game-winner with 3:55 to play, backhanding in a rebound of a shot by Vince Dunn.
Ivan Barbashev scored with 18:32 to go in the third period and David Perron, back in the lineup after being a healthy scratch on Sunday, scored 11 seconds later as the Blues won for the first time this season when trailing after two periods. The Blues were 0-12-2 when trailing after two. It was their third come-from-behind win this season. Perron added another goal with 8:48 to play that caromed in off a Florida player.
The Blues saw the puck get past Florida goalie Roberto Luongo on the flukiest of plays. Just over five minutes into the game, Robert Bortuzzo fired the puck into the Florida zone toward the corner, where it hit referee Tim Peel. The puck hit Peel at about the belt line, knocking him to the ice, and the puck dribbled along the goal line toward the Florida goal, where it hit Luongo's skate and slipped past the post and in.
Alas for the Blues, rule 78.5 iii says that a goal that goes into the goal directly off an official doesn't count, and the other referee, Furman South, waved it off while Peel was attended to by Blues trainer Ray Barile and then went to the dressing room for the rest of the period. Peel returned at the start of the second period.
Prior to that, the Blues had a four-minute power play when Jaden Schwartz, in his first game back from injured reserve, took a stick to the face. Extended power plays, of course, are not the Blues' forte, and this one wasn't either. In four minutes, the Blues had one shot on goal, though they did have Vladimir Tarasenko put a shot off the crossbar.
Florida got the goal with 4:31 to go in the first. The Blues couldn't get the puck out of their zone, with Jonathan Huberdeau getting the puck near the blueline, feeding Evgenii Dadonov who skated across the Blues crease and scored.
Perron gave the Blues, briefly, some breathing room when he took a pass from Schwartz and had his shot go in off Florida forward Frank Vatrano. The two-goal lead lasted 34 seconds before MacKenzie Weegar
That was it for scoring until the start of the third. Along the way, the Blues took another too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty, their eighth this season and fifth in Craig Berube's 10 games as coach.
