Hello there! In this unit, we're offering an engaging coding lesson that highlights the performance efficiencies offered by the utilization of HashMap in Java. We'll address a list-based problem that requires us to make an optimal choice to minimize the size of our list. Excited? So am I! Let's get started.

In this unit's task, we'll manipulate a list of integers. You are required to construct a Java function titled minimalMaxBlock(). This function should accept a list as an input and compute an intriguing property related to contiguous blocks within the list.

More specifically, you must select a particular integer, k, from the list. Once you've selected k, the function should remove all occurrences of k from the list, thereby splitting it into several contiguous blocks or remaining sub-lists. A unique feature of k is that it is chosen such that the maximum length among these blocks is minimized.

For instance, consider the list {1, 2, 2, 3, 1, 4, 4, 4, 1, 2, 5}. If we eliminate all instances of 2 (our k), the remaining blocks would be {1}, {3, 1, 4, 4, 4, 1}, , with the longest containing 6 elements. Now, if we instead remove all instances of 1, the new remaining blocks would be , , , the longest of which contains 3 elements. As such, the function should return 1 in this case, as it leads to a minimally maximal block length.