RALEIGH, N.C. — The Islanders’ season-long kryptonite of holding a lead had gone away for a while.
But it reared its ugly head at the worst possible moment on Monday night, as the Islanders took a 3-0 lead and turned it into a 5-3 loss to the Hurricanes to go down 2-0 in the first round of the playoffs after Carolina scored three times in the last 2:30 to complete the comeback, with Jordan Martinook netting the winner.
It’s the second time the Islanders have blown a 3-0 lead against the Hurricanes this season, but unlike the first one on Nov. 4, this will be excruciatingly tough to get over.
“We don’t have a choice,” Anders Lee said. “It’s obvious, that one f—ing hurts. … Right now, we’re just dealing with the sting.”
It looked as though the Islanders — despite having sat back and absorbed pressure for most of the night — would somehow get out of the night alive when they entered the final three minutes hanging onto a 3-2 lead.
But quickly following Carolina’s timeout with 2:49 to go, Sebastian Aho deflected in Andrei Svechnikov’s shot at the right post with the extra attacker on for Carolina.
Just nine seconds later, Martinook completed the Islanders’ collapse, beating Noah Dobson to the left post off the faceoff and sticking the puck in.
“Obviously the tying goal, we lost our coverage,” said a shell-shocked Patrick Roy. “I was going to call a timeout right there and I said, ‘We’ll see if the puck goes in our zone. If it goes in our zone, I will call a timeout to cool off a bit.’
“But I had [Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s] line on the ice, I was pretty confident with [Alexander] Romanov and Dobby. I thought we’d be OK.”
They weren’t.
And quickly following Roy using his own timeout and pulling his own goalie, Jake Guentzel sealed the game up with an empty-netter, the building shaking on its foundation.
The formula was much the same as so many other heartbreaking losses the Islanders suffered this season.
They got a big lead.
They sat back and tried to bleed out the rest of the game.
And there was too much time on the clock for that to even have a chance of working.
The game swung almost immediately after Lee put the Islanders up by three with a skillful power-play goal 3:54 into the second period.
The Islanders got out to their lead by ugly means — the Hurricanes had a huge majority of chances even down 3-0 — but from there, they barely even left their defensive zone.
“Playing around for two periods and just hope that we’ll find a way,” Dobson said, summing things up. “We gotta have a pushback and obviously we weren’t good enough tonight.”
This became an onslaught to which they had no answer, with Carolina putting in shift after shift where the Islanders could not get off the ice.
Teuvo Teravainen finally broke through on the power play when Adam Pelech got caught up ice and the Islanders subsequently left the backside unguarded for Teravainen to put in Guentzel’s feed off a rebound to pull within 3-1.
That was where it sat entering the third, but the tone and tenor of the night had completely shifted.
Whatever the score, Carolina had all the momentum in its own building and the Islanders would need to depend on a combination of desperate defending and Semyon Varlamov to hang on.
As well as Varlamov played, stopping 34 shots, that was not going to work without some kind of push of their own.
And when Seth Jarvis wired a wrist shot from the left-side dot to make it 3-2, the Islanders were suddenly defending a one-goal lead with 9:17 to go.
Another bad omen appeared when Kyle MacLean’s goal on the very next shift was instantly ruled out for a high stick — snuffing out any chance they had at momentum.
The Islanders, who were the better team in Game 1 and who held a 3-0 lead in Game 2, had every chance to steal a game down here and come back home with home ice, or even a 2-0 lead.
Instead, they are going home facing the same 2-0 deficit they did at this stage last year and wondering whether their best chance has already slipped through their fingers.
Heartbreak. Not for the first time. But certainly the worst time.