A brilliant Alexander Prass strike helped Hoffenheim tighten their grip on third with a 2-0 win at Werder Bremen on Thursday, while RB Leipzig were held 1-1 late at St Pauli.
Relegation battlers last season, Hoffenheim won thanks to Prass' long-range effort and a Grischa Proemel goal, while fighting for most of the second-half a man down.
They have now lost just one of their past 13 Bundesliga games and sit in the Champions League spots, three points behind Borussia Dortmund.
"The numbers don't come from nothing," Proemel said to DAZN. "We play intense, we run so much.
"It's easy to describe it as being 'in form', but there's a lot more to it than that.
"We're talking about it (the Champions League), but we know it's a long way away. We need to keep it up."
A second-half Yan Diomande goal had Leipzig on track for victory, but captain David Raum slipped and gave away a penalty deep into stoppage time, which Martijn Kaars converted to snatch a point.
"For us it's extremely unlucky, but unfortunately it is a penalty," Leipzig's Christoph Baumgartner told DAZN.
"It's not that he wasn't concentrating. It was just a bit of bad luck."
Having narrowly beaten the drop last campaign, Hoffenheim had battling Bremen on the ropes from the opening minute.
Prass broke Bremen's resilience just before the break with an incredible long-range rocket.
Even the sending off of Hoffenheim's Wouter Burger for a dangerous tackle early in the second-half did not derail Hoffenheim's momentum.
Just two minutes after Burger saw red on VAR review, Proemel turned a rebound from a Vladimir Coufal cross in from close range.
Bremen's slim hopes of a comeback were snuffed out when Romano Schmid's clever backheel was chalked off for a narrow offside.
In Hamburg, Leipzig took the lead with 66 minutes gone when Diomande's speculative effort took a wicked deflection and landed in the net.
The goal was Leipzig's first at St Pauli's Millerntor Stadium in their fourth visit.
With Leipzig seemingly in control and on track to go one point behind Hoffenheim, Raum fell clumsily, taking out Kaars in the box.
The contact was accidental but the referee immediately pointed to the spot. Kaars made no mistake from the spot to grab lowly Pauli a valuable draw, taking them a point above last-placed Heidenheim.
Both matches were rescheduled from early January due to wild winter weather.
The final delayed match, between Hamburg and Bayer Leverkusen, will take place in early March.