The Islanders needed this one, but more than that, they needed this one in this way.
They needed to hold a lead in the third period, something they’ve failed to do in five of the past seven games, and they needed the special teams to thrive after Patrick Roy called the power play “awful” a little more than 24 hours prior in Washington.
They needed to overcome those twin blocks which have held the entire season back and they needed to do it yesterday.
“It’s exactly what we wanted tonight. We wanted to have to go face it,” Anders Lee said after Saturday’s 3-0 win over the Sabres in which the Islanders — finally — jumped through those most rudimentary hoops. “We wanted to go right after it. We did exactly what we wanted to do. Go get a two-goal lead and let’s finish it off.”
No one is circling the wagons here, though there was a visible and understandable sense of relief in the dressing room.
Everyone ought to recall the Islanders did the same thing just a week ago against the Blues before falling victim to the same issues.
Turning a season around does not happen in one night.
The Islanders, now 9-10-6, are still a game below NHL-.500, still out of a playoff spot and have still lost seven more games than they have won.
Still, at least they are not spending Sunday contemplating yet another blown lead. And you can’t start stacking wins without getting one.
“I think every box got checked tonight,” Ryan Pulock told The Post. “PK did a great job, power play got us started and yeah, obviously, we know we’ve been playing good and we’ve let our guard down in third periods and it’s really cost us. We knew tonight that we weren’t being denied.”
The special teams are the subhead, but the big deal here is the third period, which the Islanders walked into with a 2-0 lead, fresh off blowing a 4-2 game to the Capitals on Friday.
That was the mental hurdle in front of a club which had gotten to its game decently enough over the first 40 minutes, despite an 11/7 lineup without Jean-Gabriel Pageau (lower body) or Pierre Engvall, who was made an example of in the form of a healthy scratch.
The Islanders were not doing anything particularly special, with a two-minute second-period scoring spurt from Anders Lee and Simon Holmstrom accounting for their 2-0 lead, but this was not a night for that.
They were down in the shot count and the high-danger chance count, but who cares? Could they hold a lead?
The sense started to shift after Bo Horvat took what has become the customary third-period penalty for the Islanders, who then not only killed it off, but did not look to be on the back foot at all in doing so.
Still, after the puck fell off Brock Nelson’ stick on a sure-thing chance to extend the lead to three with under 10 minutes to go, it was hard not to feel as though this could go the wrong way.
The vibes, however, were defeated courtesy of a clean final three minutes at five-on-six — something that has been a rarity over the last year and change — with Simon Holmstrom’s empty-netter securing Ilya Sorokin’s first shutout of the season.
Recently, Hudson Fasching said, the internal conversations within the dressing room have gone from assuming the third periods were just bad bounces — and thus not really acknowledging an issue as a group — to active discussions and team meetings about how to fix the issue.
“I think eventually, we gotta talk about it and be like, ‘Alright, what do we think’s going on here?’ ” Fasching said. “I think we put some serious effort into it and the thing is for us to not sit back. We wanted to make sure we’re punching forward, wanted to make sure we go get them, not just sit on our heels and get scored on.”
With that, it won’t go unnoticed that the power play — a momentum-sapping device throughout the last couple of weeks —finally awoke the offense when Lee deflected in Kyle Palmieri’s feed to the crease at 7:23 of the second.
Two minutes later, it was Lee feeding Holmstrom on a two-on-one rush to make it 2-0.
That is the winning formula. Special teams and locking down leads late in games.
That is what the Islanders have been missing. That is what they must replicate again and again.