On the day where the Boston Bruins won the Jarmir Jagr sweepstakes, there was still an important matchup Tuesday night against the Ottawa Senators with playoff implications at stake.

Behind Nathan Horton’s game-winning goal, the Bruins escaped with a 3-2 victory in front of another sell-out crowd of 17,565 at TD Garden and extended their lead on the Sens to six points for fourth in the Eastern Conference standings. The win also pulled the Black and Gold within one point of the Montreal Canadiens for first place in the Northeast Division.

It was another sluggish start for the Black and Gold as they saw themselves down 1-0 nearly three minutes into the game. This time, the B’s answered and answered very quickly on David Krejci’s ninth of a year defelecting a Zdeno Chara shot past Robin Lehner. A minute later, Brad Marchand found a streaking Tyler Seguin with a beautiful pass and the third-year forward buried his 12th of the year to give the Black and Gold a 2-1 lead within the first five minutes.

Both Lehner and Khudobin made several great stops all night. The two teams combined for 97 shots with Khudobin making 45 saves, while Lehner made 47 in the losing effort.

Despite the workload, Khuodbin was happy to help his team get those all-important two points.

“Like I said, I’m pretty sure for their goalie it’s not fun right now because he lost,” Khudobin said. “But it doesn’t matter for me. I got the ‘W’ so I’m happy with that. We got our points and we keep moving forward. I’m pretty happy. If it could be less maybe I wouldn’t be that much tired. It’s all right.”

The Senators eventually tied the game in the third period because it’s what the Bruins do – give third period leads away. Jim O’Brien evened the game at two on a strange sequence of events, but Boston would not go out that easily.

With 9:39 left in the third period, Milan Lucic fired a slap shot on Lehner and on the extra effort Horton, who has now scored in four straight games, went to the dirty area and buried the game-winning goal.

Tyler Seguin talked about winning the game, but losing Patrice Bergeron in the process (Bergeron left after taking an elbow to the head).

“Obviously, going into the third he wasn’t in the lineup anymore,” he said. “I guess you could say we adjusted for that period. Obviously, we got a quick one and we found a way to win and that’s what we wanted to do for him.”

The first-line had another good showing tonight and Krejci explained what has turned their line around.

“Obviously, we like that we’re putting the puck in the net that’s nice to see, but we also know that we can play a little better next game and hopefully the puck will keep going in their net,” Krejci said.

The Jagr era will begin on Thursday night as the Devils come to town. The Bruins sit in fourth place in the Eastern Conference with a 23-8-4 record (50 points) while the Devils hold the seventh seed with 39 points (15-12-9).

Postgame video featuring David Krejci, Anton Khudobin, Tyler Seguin and Brad Marchand