The Buffalo Bison stopped the Saints cold in their last game of the series, taking an 8-3 victory Sunday at Sahlen Field.

Royce Lewis finished his second rehab game 2-5 with a double and run, and DaShawn Keirsey Jr. added a two-run homer in the third inning, giving the Saints a 2-1 lead. The Bisons took the lead back in the bottom of the inning.

Buffalo’s three-run sixth ended the contest, despite the Saints scoring a final run in the ninth inning.

St. Paul’s next series begins Tuesday with a doubleheader against the Rochester Red Wings.

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DALLAS – Minnesota’s biggest flaw heading into the postseason was quite obvious to anyone who paid attention throughout the course of the regular season – the Timberwolves couldn’t close games.

Minnesota was quite literally one of the worst in clutch-time situations over the back-half of the campaign.

Clutch time is defined as the time in the final five minutes of a contest in which the margin is within five points. In those situations post-Christmas, the Wolves were out-scored by 26.5 points per 100 possessions. Their defense was bad in clutch time, and their offense was worse. Ball holding, indecision and a lack of player movement left Minnesota’s late-game offense often stuck in the muck. Misses and turnovers prevented Minnesota from getting back and setting its defense up to its optimal setup, which makes getting stops a chore.

That figured to bite the Timberwolves in the playoffs.

But it didn’t – not through the first two rounds, anyway. Anthony Edwards obliterated Phoenix down the stretch of Game 4 to close out Minnesota’s first-round sweep in the only competitive contest between the two teams.

Against Denver, Game 1 and Game 7 were both in doubt in the closing minutes, only to have Minnesota’s offense prove largely unstoppable to secure the first and last victories of the series.

The problems appeared to be solved – until they weren’t.

The late-game issues have reared their ugly heads in the Western Conference semifinals. Minnesota led the bulk of the first two games of the series, only to squander advantages late. The Wolves rallied in the second half of Game 3 on Sunday and held a two-point lead with five minutes to play after Kyle Anderson’s toss at the hoop dropped to beat the shot clock with 5 minutes, 5 seconds to play.

That was the last bucket of consequence the Wolves would score. Minnesota tallied just one point between Anderson’s miraculous shot and Anthony Edwards’ irrelevant layup with 15 seconds to play – a Naz Reid free-throw. In between those buckets were seven missed shots and turnover.

Edwards said the ball was sticking too much in the Wolves’ hands, particularly his.

“I thought it was our offense that broke down, more than anything. You’ve got to try to score alongside of them,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said. “We just didn’t execute very well, didn’t find the open guy very well down the stretch. And when we had open looks, they were nowhere near going in.”

It is tough to win that way.

As it is when you commit two turnovers in the final minute of regulation, like Minnesota did in Game 2 en route to blowing a five-point advantage in the final 90 seconds.

Then there’s Game 1, which Minnesota led by four with 3 minutes, 37 seconds to play, only to then go scoreless until Reid scored with 10 seconds to play. That fatal scoring drought featured four missed shots and three turnovers.

And Dallas is doing the complete opposite on the other end of the floor. The Mavericks – who sported the NBA’s fourth-best clutch-time net rating post Christmas, outscoring opponents by 23.8 points per 100 possessions – are routinely carving Minnesota’s top-ranked defense up with the game on the line.

Oftentimes it’s via Luka Doncic sizing up an opponent 1 on 1 before either getting to the mid range to knock down a jumper, or hitting a stepback triple. At other points, he’s catching the Wolves napping, like he did late Sunday, when he saw Edwards’ back turned to the play and made a quick pass that led to a hockey assist on a P.J. Washington triple to put Dallas up 107-104. Minnesota never recovered.

“It starts with kind of a mental breakdown on a left-corner 3 from Washington when the game is tied,” Finch said, “and that gives them just enough breathing room.”

Dallas is out-scoring Minnesota by 39.2 points per 100 possessions in the clutch in this series. It’s the difference between the Mavericks being up 3-0 – the current state of the situation – and Minnesota potentially even leading the series.

“The whole series, we’ve struggled to close games. These three minute games that we’re playing, we’re losing,” Finch said. “That’s been the story of the series.”

It’s easy to look at that and think how easily things could be flipped. But the reality is the playoffs reveal who you are – both your strengths and warts. And this has been a major wart for Minnesota all season that was left unresolved, and now has the Wolves on the brink of elimination.

“If we were winning these games, you would feel confident when you look up and see four minutes left and you’re winning the game, you’re going to think positive thoughts,” Wolves guard Mike Conley said. “I can’t speak for every person but I’m sure we’re looking up and saying ‘How are we going to win this one? How are we going to figure it out?’

“That’s a moment of the game where we have to be tight, together and figure it out. Obviously, (the struggles are) on our minds. For the majority of the series, we were giving ourselves a chance, giving ourselves leads, giving ourselves opportunity. We know what part of the game we need to be better at. The part that’s gonna win us the game is that fourth quarter.”

Many basketball games are won in the final five minutes. Or, in the Wolves’ case, they’re lost.

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Travel writers Susan and Simon Veness were trying to escape the rat race when they hit the road for a year in an RV.

“For the last 20 years we have been working flat-out, seven days a week, never took time off,” Susan Veness says. “We didn’t take vacations, and we were so burned out that we just needed to hit the reset button.”

The Venesses took off in their 36-foot RV – dog Ruthie and a subcompact car in tow – with a route in mind that went to Michigan, then across the country to the West Coast before swooping down across the South and back home to Apopka.

“The challenge was to try and see as much of the country as we could. We really wanted to see America,” Simon Veness says.

Their mission was completed, mostly, and ended recently with a stay at Fort Wilderness at Walt Disney World. There were bumps along the way, including mechanical difficulties, a stretch of 19 days without hot water, tight mountain passes and harrowing bridges that might have contributed to high blood pressure.

“We met a lot of mobile technicians in those first months,” Susan says. After two months and another frustrating RV repair, they considered pulling the plug on the 12-month project that had been in the works for four years.

“So we had to take the rig in, stay in a hotel. We spent a couple of days really just saying we’re not sure we can do this,” Susan says. “And then we bucked up our courage and decided, yeah, we want to keep going. And then, for months, it was just beautiful. Smooth sailing.”

“The last six months were the gravy. They just seemed to go so fast,” Simon says.

The Venesses are the creators of “The Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World” book sires and the “Brit Guide to Orlando and Walt Disney World” guidebook. They have written for blogs, magazines and newspapers, and their trip updates have appeared in The Independent newspaper in the U.K. The second edition of Susan’s “Walt Disney World Hacks” book came out in April.

They submitted another book days before heading out in the RV. This fall, their new book “111 Places in Orlando That You Must Not Miss,” will be published.

Their on-the-road workload was “doing this easy stuff that we can do remotely rather than the press events and the openings and the restaurants and everything that goes with it, which is what makes it feel like you’re on a treadmill,” Simon says.

A stand-out state for Simon was Utah, he says.

“Absolutely everywhere we went, there was a stunning panorama … amazing national parks, just incredible vistas right throughout the state,” he says.

Another highlight for the couple was watching “wave after wave” of sandhill cranes at Wilcox Playa in southeast Arizona, Susan says.

“We spent a whole evening one night watching these birds flying in from literally out of the sunset into this wildlife area of marshlands, where they were settling for the winter,” Simon says.

“It was mind-blowing watching those. The noise, the site, the backdrop. It was like a David Attenborough nature documentary. You’re sitting there open-jawed for hours watching those,” he says.

Travel writers Susan and Simon Veness stand with their 36-foot Winnebago, their home for a year, while rolling across the country. (Courtesy Veness family)

So much togetherness in such tight living quarters was not an issue for Venesses, they said.

“We’re always together. For 20 years all of our work has been together. So that was really the easy part,” she says.

“Our office is only 11 feet square [at home], and both of us are in there pretty much every day,” he says.

Along the way, they decided their initial itinerary was too ambitious, so they opted against Washington, Oregon and northern California, which allowed them to slow their pace.

Simon says he eventually got used to the conditions of driving an RV.

“You’ve got to be dialed in all the time because it just takes one small give in the road, and it throws you off course because of the weight of the whole vehicle,” he says.

“By the end of the trip, I didn’t want to stop because I love the view from the cab,” he says.

The trip covered more than 35,000 miles between the RV and the car in 22 states.

The Venesses check out Mount Rushmore, one of several landmarks visited during their RV adventure. (Courtesy Veness photo)

Once they got back to Florida, they stayed at Disney World before heading back to their house.

“We really wanted to end the trip where, really, everything for us started. We met through Disney, you know, we got engaged to IllumiNations [at Epcot]. A huge portion of our work has been around the theme parks,” Susan says.

They say they missed their Florida neighbors; they didn’t miss the humidity.

They plan to write something about the experience, but they’re mulling the best angle to take. They believe they’ll make another RV trip, but for a shorter duration and in a smaller vehicle.

“We definitely want to do more,” Simon says. “We still have unfinished business out west.”

dbevil@orlandosentinel.com