Angry glares shot across the Manchester United penalty area last Sunday while Tottenham Hotspur's Clint Dempsey streaked away from goal in celebration.

Deep into stoppage time, his goal had tied the game at 1-1, costing United two points in the English Premier League title race. So the defenders glared at each other and they glared at their goalkeeper. Because Manchester United is usually the team scoring late goals, not the one giving them up.

"Anytime you can get a point when you're looking at defeat, it almost feels like a win," Dempsey said afterward.

The late heroics may have belonged to Tottenham on Sunday, but as the past 20 years have shown, the undisputed champion of turning a game in the dying moments is Manchester United.

Since the Premier League began in 1992, United has trailed going into the 80th minute in 128 games. And it avoided losing those games more than one fifth of the time, turning 28 of those would-be defeats into 24 draws and four victories, according to Opta.

Robin van Persie of Manchester United looks on during the Barclays Premier League match between Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United at White Hart Lane, Jan. 20, 2013 Getty Images

Of the seven clubs that have played in every Premier League season, only Arsenal comes anywhere close to United's remarkable 21.9% record for dodging defeat with 17.7%. The next four—Everton, Liverpool, Chelsea and Tottenham—have turned games between 9.5% and 12% of the time.

"You'd rather do without it, but being the manager of Manchester United you have to relish it and expect it to happen," manager Alex Ferguson told the club's magazine Inside United recently. "That's just the club. That's how it is."

It always has been, throughout Ferguson's 26 years in charge. Top of United's list of memorable late shows has to be the 1999 Champions League final against Bayern Munich when the team scored twice in three minutes of stoppage time to flip a 1-0 deficit.

This season, United's uncanny ability to fight back could be paving the way to yet another trophy. It has trailed in 18 of its 33 games across all competitions but still won 11 of them. And late goals, including six match-winners scored after the 80th minute, have directly accounted for at least nine extra points to the Premier League leader this year and kept it alive in the FA Cup.

One tempting explanation for United's barnstorming finishes is the phenomenon commonly known as Fergie Time. Over the years, it has come to mean those nervous moments beyond the 90-minute mark that drag on just long enough for Ferguson's team to snatch a late goal.

Because there are no strict guidelines for referees on how to compensate for stoppages within stoppage time, those officiating United's games are often accused of tacking on too much at the end of games while Ferguson shouts on the sideline, pointing at his watch.

The problem with Fergie Time is that it seems to be a myth. Though United has seen an average of 4 minutes and 38 seconds tacked on to the end of its Premier League games this season—the second-highest average in the league—it is only 37 seconds more than the team with the least, Liverpool.

More significantly, United's second-half stoppage time was actually the lowest in the league last season and among the lowest the season before.

So the real answer isn't Fergie Time. It's Fergie's Tactics, according to former Liverpool manager Phil Thompson.

"A lot of teams, when they're behind in games, go very direct and they start launching the ball straight into penalty boxes, which is quite easy for defenders to defend against," he said. "Manchester United don't. They keep probing."

How much Manchester United actually works on those situations is hard to say, because Ferguson runs his practices as if they were CIA briefings. This is a club, after all, that travels as late as possible to away Champions League games in order to avoid training before prying eyes in opponents' stadiums.

Thompson said that while most clubs don't work on any specific late-game sequences—a soccer equivalent to American football's "two-minute" drill—they do have certain practice-field exercises that directly impact the closing minutes. At Liverpool, he said, they were called "shape" drills: 15- or 20-minute sequences where players are coached to spread the field and quickly trade positions, just as they are instructed to when they're chasing a late goal.

Ferguson hints at this in the way he uses substitutes when his side is behind. Six of United's seven late turnarounds this season have seen the manager throw on a speedy wide player in the last half hour. And it's no coincidence that a majority of the late goals were generated from wide positions.

"He's quite willing to play more offensive players but still keep the shape: two very wide ones, one up front, with one down the middle," Thompson said. In other words, it becomes a more aggressive form of Ferguson's usual 4-5-1 formation.

Defending the onslaught is one of the trickiest situations for opposing managers, who have to sit on the sideline and hope their players stay disciplined enough to hang on.

"That's one of the most vital things, particularly against Manchester United at Old Trafford, is to be organized coming into the last stages of a match, the last 10 minutes," Thompson said. "The tiredness creeps in."

And so do the mistakes. The most obvious sign is when defenders are slow to push up the field after repelling an attack. It only takes one of them to straggle back a little too casually for his opponents to easily spring the offside trap. As a former defender and defensive specialist as an assistant coach, Thompson finds watching players fail to clear the penalty box together especially infuriating.

But for United, it's the sign of a job well done in the dying stages, that the opportunity to snatch one more goal can't be far away.

"At the end of the day, the finish to these games sends everybody home absolutely over the moon," Ferguson told the magazine.

"They'll be walking down the street towards their cars, or getting in their cars and driving home, telling each other: 'What a game, absolutely fantastic.' "