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- The following is the list of teams to overcome 3–1 series deficits mainly concerning North American professional sports. The listed teams won three consecutive games after being down three games to one in a best-of-seven playoff series. This is similar to a comeback from a 2–0 series deficit in a best-of-five playoff series, which also requires winning three straight games, but these are not covered here. All 3–1 deficit comebacks in a seven-game series involve winning a succession of elimination games, finally featuring a double-elimination game seven. Longer series of this nature are almost always structured as single-elimination knockout tournaments, so the loss of the series ends playoff contention for the losing side. This playoff structure is common in North American professional sports, particularly in the sports of baseball, basketball, and ice hockey where it's feasible to compete every other day or sometimes back-to-back. Games such as American football and rugby are too physical to support a playoff structure of this nature, requiring longer intervals between games. Soccer is one of the world's most popular sports, and would permit this structure, but soccer tournaments are conventionally structured differently, with larger pools of group play (this is also the case with tournaments of the International Ice Hockey Federation, typically hosted in Europe). Baseball uniquely contains a key position which can not sustain the frequent play schedule, that of the starting pitcher, so the game is structured around a pitching rotation, which pretty much demands a series playoff structure, so that all pitchers appear, to fairly determine the strength of the team as a whole. Examples outside of North America of the seven-game structure include the Taiwan Series baseball tournament, the final round of the Japan Series, the Chinese, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Turkish baseball leagues, and later rounds of the Gagarin Cup of the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) based in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and China. Within North America there are also some intermediate leagues below the major league level such as hockey's Calder Cup. A common comeback scenario is where a heavy favorite digs themselves into a deep hole on early adversity, before reasserting their dominance over a weaker opponent when the chips are down. This explains in part why these comebacks are rare in most sports: powerhouse teams most capable of mounting a comeback don't usually dig themselves into this predicament in the first place. Additionally, over a longer series, teams adapt to the strengths and weaknesses of their opponent (more so than in regular season play); stronger teams are usually better at making these adjustments, which makes a "Cinderella" comeback by the weaker team that much more difficult to pull off. In team sports where an individual position has the potential for outsize impact (e.g. a starting pitcher in baseball or a goalie in hockey), a comeback can sometimes be leveraged by a weaker team off of a heroic individual performance. Implicit in overcoming a 3–1 series deficit are all teams who have overcome a 3–0 series deficit. These are noted in the series comment cells and—lacking an explicit column in the tabular format—can be identified with a text search within the article page for the text string "3–0". (en)
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