This first game of a seven-game homestand felt more like the first day back from vacation for the Islanders, and not in a good way.
In a lot of ways, that’s what the three-game road trip preceding Tuesday — all wins — was.
A break from what the rest of a largely disappointing season has been.
The Islanders were, out of nowhere, going into the buildings of playoff teams and winning.
Back in their own backyard, against an Eastern Conference opponent in what amounted to a four-point game in the chase for the second wild-card spot, this looked more like the product the Islanders have put out for most of the season, and the Senators came away 2-0 victors at UBS Arena.
“We should have been more hungry,” coach Patrick Roy said on a night when the Islanders offered the home crowd so little that it resorted to doing the wave during the third period of a one-goal game. “We should have had more urgency than what we did. Sometimes you have to dig those ones [out] and for some reason we did not.”
The Islanders carried over the physicality and hard defense that sustained them out West.
But offensively, they struggled as much as ever, failing to break the puck out for much of the night, never crashing the net and thus, failing to do much of anything against a goalie in Leevi Merilainen who started just his ninth NHL game.
The result, after a would-be Adam Gaudette goal was waved off a few minutes into the night following Roy’s successful goalie interference challenge, was a game of attrition, in which every inch of ice was fought over.
That’s the sort of match in which the Islanders can sometimes thrive, but not as often as in past years, and not Tuesday.
The Islanders lost ground fast, and found themselves playing much of the game in their own zone before they knew it.
“It’s on us to be able to find ways when there’s not a lot out there, just to play simple and get pucks to the net and create havoc that way,” Noah Dobson told The Post. “We just didn’t do a good enough job of that.”
The Islanders were missing Jean-Gabriel Pageau and Ilya Sorokin — both out with illness — but this wasn’t about their injuries or the bug going around the locker room, which forced Marc Gatcomb into an NHL debut via emergency call-up and Marcus Hogberg into a second straight start in the crease.
The top line, which drove play all night long two nights earlier in Utah, was bottled up all night playing largely against Brady Tkachuk’s line for the Senators.
That only put Anders Lee, Brock Nelson and Mathew Barzal in the same group as the rest of the Islanders, who couldn’t get anything going no matter who was on the ice.
It didn’t help matters that the power play continued marching toward the abyss, getting nothing on its lone opportunity to extend a scoreless streak to 25 straight chances dating back well over a month.
That all resulted in a night when Gaudette’s tip-in of Tyler Kleven’s blue-line shot 8:42 into the second made the difference, with Artem Zub’s empty-netter the icing on the cake.
Even down one in the third, the Islanders couldn’t put together a push. Over the final 40 minutes, they recorded all of two high-danger chances, even as the breakouts got slightly better.
Really, it was only down to Hogberg, who finished with 23 saves, that the game didn’t get out of hand in the third.
“We didn’t go to the net enough. We didn’t generate enough offense by throwing pucks at the net,” Roy said. “Maybe we tried to be a little too perfect. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s how they scored their goal. Shot from the point, tip in front and that’s the hard way. And maybe we need to generate offense sometimes by doing things the hard way.”
That’s the same message Roy has had for the Islanders all season. But sustaining those basic principles for more than a game or two at once has proved exceedingly difficult, let alone four straight.
The balloon punctured here on Tuesday, and the tough reality for the Islanders is that over a 3-1-0 stretch, the one loss hurts a lot more than the three wins help.
That’s life in the middle of the scrap heap, and with a Columbus win, their playoff deficit is back to seven points.
Vacation’s over for the Islanders. It’s back to the long, hard winter of the East — and they’re going to need more than this to survive it.