After enduring months of misery, the Vancouver Canucks finally found some joy Saturday by inflicting a little pain on others as they rallied three times to beat the San Jose Sharks 4-3 in a shootout.

The Hockey Night in Canada nightcap, the warmup act to Scott Oake’s final show on After Hours, was terrific entertainment and the win, oddly enough, seemed to mean nearly as much to the Canucks as losing a point did to the Sharks.

The Canucks have 23 wins and 54 points, the Sharks 37 wins and 82 points. But neither team is going to the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Although not mathematically eliminated, the desperate Sharks needed both points from the last-overall Canucks to maintain any hope of catching the Los Angeles Kings for the final wild-card spot in the Western Conference.

With three games remaining, the Sharks trail their Golden State rivals by five points. And the two teams between them in the standings, Nashville and Winnipeg, hold the tie-breaker over San Jose.

So the Sharks, for all of their speed and blossoming skill and generational star Macklin Celebrini’s teenage greatness, are extremely likely to miss the post-season for the seventh straight year.

The duration of the Sharks’ rebuild, frequently trumpeted as a template to follow, is a sobering reminder about what may be in store for the rebuilding Canucks.

But nobody on the team would have been thinking about that on Saturday night when the team, with 10 regulation losses in its previous 11 games, tied it 3-3 on Teddy Blueger’s power-play goal with three minutes remaining in the third period, then won it on Linus Karlsson’s bar-down shot in the sixth round of the shootout.

Canucks goalie Kevin Lankinen, already the most successful in NHL history among goalies who have faced at least 50 shootout........

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