MONTREAL — Even when the Islanders look well on their way to getting blown out, they are not a team that goes quietly.
For 40 minutes on Saturday, this was the Islanders getting bossed around the ice by a Canadiens team that started the day in seventh place in its division, struggling to break the puck out and generating almost no pressure on Sam Montembeault.
Then for the next 20, it was a scrambling comeback attempt that ultimately fell short, turning into a 5-3 loss to the Canadiens that leaves you shrugging your shoulders a little bit incredulous.
Those games do happen when you play 82 of them, and the Islanders might be justified in thinking they can burn the tape and forget about it given how well they’ve played over the last month and given that they showed some fight in the third period.
The ultimately failed comeback started just 2:07 into the last period, when an unusually aggressive penalty kill for the Islanders paid off, with Brock Nelson finding the net shorthanded.
Nelson would do so a second time — this one at even strength — at the 3:43 mark, capitalizing on a few shifts worth of pressure by the Islanders.
This suddenly looked like a game the Islanders had played so many times this season, but in reverse. Now they were the team coming out of nowhere to deliver pressure, the team finding belief after getting bossed around the ice for 40 minutes, the team quieting a home crowd.
That quiet would feel a lot louder after Bo Horvat scored with 5:54 to go in the game, jumping on Noah Dobson’s rebound to make it 4-3.
But they never could come up with one last goal to tie it, and the crowd’s roars would return when Christian Dvorak scored into an empty net with 19.3 seconds to go.
The lesson from the night as a whole might be that — as much as Mike Reilly, Robert Bortuzzo and Samuel Bolduc have helped to fill the void on the back end — the Islanders could sure use Adam Pelech, Ryan Pulock and Scott Mayfield right about now.
They survived what was a sloppy and poorly-structured start until the 7:45 mark in the second, when Joel Armia beat Semyon Varlamov from the slot after Alexander Romanov couldn’t win a puck battle along the wall.
Things fell apart quickly from there.
Josh Anderson, who going into the evening had not scored in 369:34 this season at five-on-five, would do so twice in the next 10 minutes, getting one through traffic from the high slot and stuffing in his own rebound at 19:06 of the period.
Just 15 seconds after that, the Islanders let Cole Caufield stroll into the slot uninterrupted and send a one-timer past Varlamov.
Whether as a result of tired legs or an aggressive Montreal forecheck, the Islanders struggled to break the puck out.
They made mistakes around and behind their net and hoped it wouldn’t cost them.
Structurally, they were nothing short of a mess.
To a man, they made bad decisions with the puck and threw away the good habits that were built up over the course of the last four weeks.
The good news is that those habits seemed to return in the third period, though failing to collect any points underscores that the Islanders suffered the same failure to play 60 minutes that has dogged them for much of the season.
Still, ringing the alarm bells after just a second regulation loss over the last month would be silly.
The Islanders are capable of far better than they showed Saturday, that much they have proven.
But in a playoff race that, a third of the way through the season looks as though it will feature razor-thin margins, these are games where taking care of business would be well-advised.