The exact time when the meltdown began Tuesday is less important than how it happened, but generally speaking, it was around 9 p.m. when both the Timberwolves and Twins turned into the worst versions of themselves.

The Wolves led 95-71 against the Bucks early in the fourth quarter before Milwaukee started chipping and eventually hammering away at the deficit using a basic zone defense.

Wolves players stood around befuddled, ending possessions with missed shots, ill-conceived drives and lazy passes that became transition buckets. Final score: Milwaukee 110, Minnesota 103.

At around the same time, the Twins had a decent threat extinguished when their highest-paid player (Carlos Correa) grounded into double play with runners on the corners in a 1-1 game in the eighth. They then lost the lead because reliever Griffin Jax airmailed a simple throw to first base. Final score: Royals 2, Twins 1.

The elapsed time of the entirety of the calamities was about 30 minutes, and it was one of the most embarrassing half-hours of Minnesota sports that I can recall.

I broke it down on Wednesday's "Daily Delivery" podcast, but let's take a closer look at what we learned from both games and teams here.

The bigger picture for the Wolves was more considerable than that of the Twins given the gravity of the loss, the sample size of their nearly completed season and their puzzling collective reaction afterward.

With a win they should have secured handily, the Wolves would have remained in a five-team logjam at 47-32 in the West, with tiebreaker edges and other schedule advantages giving them the inside track at a top-four seed and home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs. Instead, they fell to eighth and are in peril of needing to advance through the play-in round.

They must have been sufficiently embarrassed and mad, right?

"We good," Anthony Edwards said postgame. "I mean, it's a part of the game. Of course we didn't want to lose. But we can't be in bad spirits because we know we need to win next game. So, we can't really think too much about it. It happened. I don't think we feel too down about it."

Nope. That's not it.

You can have an "on to the next one" mentality while still being three or four degrees more upset than Wolves players and coaches seemed Tuesday.

And the loss retold us a lesson we've learned a dozen times this year: Don't trust the Wolves. They have the talent to win a playoff series, but the way they buckled against the Bucks means a one-and-done is far more likely.

The big picture for the Twins is less certain, but as they offer us combinations of poor fielding, hitting and starting pitching — any combination of which can doom them on any given night — it becomes more likely that they are a bad team rather than a team having a bad start to the season.

(And all of these words increase the likelihood that both teams will go on huge winning streaks soon, in which case I will claim all of this as a reverse jinx).