With two goals in the final 4:57 of regulation against the NHL’s best defense, Minnesota’s spirited comeback gave a sputtering team one point for the standings and some confidence for the stretch run.

Alex Ovechkin’s magnificence on the power play proved to be unbeatable.

T.J. Oshie scored his second goal of the game 1:42 into overtime to bookend Ovechkin’s hat trick, Braden Holtby earned his 40th win and the league-leading Capitals topped the Wild 5-4 on Tuesday night for their fifth straight victory.

The Ovechkin-Nicklas Backstrom-Oshie line combined for nine points.

“They say if you can keep shooting, it goes in,” said Ovechkin, whose team was outscored 4-1 and outshot 24-13 during 5-on-5 play.

After Eric Staal’s goal for the Wild tied the game with 26.6 seconds left in regulation, Oshie took a pass in the left circle from Marcus Johansson and beat struggling Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk with a wrist shot. Johansson had four assists.

Martin Hanzal and Jason Pominville had a goal and an assist apiece, but the Wild lost for the eighth time in nine games and fell to 3-11-1 in March after forward Zach Parise exited early with an injury.

Oshie started Washington’s longest road trip in six years, five games over an eight-day span, with a first-period goal set up by Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. Holtby made 26 saves, brushing off the late goals by Jared Spurgeon and Staal to reach 40 victories for the third consecutive season. Martin Brodeur (2005-08, New Jersey) and Evgeni Nabokov (2007-10, San Jose) are the only other goalies in NHL history to accomplish that feat.

Dubnyk, who stopped 15 shots, has given up 26 goals over his last eight games.

Ovechkin gave him even more trouble, guiding the Capitals one step closer to the Presidents’ Trophy and home-ice advantage throughout the Stanley Cup playoffs. His 17th career three-goal game came all on power plays.

After Nate Prosser was penalized for hooking, Backstrom and Johansson set up Ovechkin for a vintage left-circle wrist shot to finish the tic-tac-toe sequence and break a tie. Dubnyk was slow to pivot right after going down to a knee on a pass.

Ovechkin, the gap-toothed great, took over the team goal lead from Oshie with a slap shot from the same spot a little later in the second period following a hooking call on Nino Niederreiter.

“We can design all we want,” said Wild coach Bruce Boudreau, for whom Ovechkin played five seasons with the Capitals. “The idea, I guess, is to prevent them from making that play over to him, and we weren’t able to do that.”

Then, after Hanzal scored for just the second time in 14 games with the Wild since arriving in a trade with Arizona, Ovechkin triggered a shower of hats from the crowd by burying a feed from Backstrom for his 33rd goal of the season.

“He’s got a strange release. It comes off that blade different every time and hard,” Holtby said. “Ninety-eight percent of our saves are reading the stick blade.”

Ovechkin has a whopping 11 goals and six assists in six career games against Dubnyk, four of those with Minnesota.

“It’s going to happen if he gets the time and space,” Dubnyk said. “If you watch him, he does that every night when he gets opportunities.”