SAINT PAUL, Minn. — The Islanders were one goal away from finishing their road trip in just about perfect fashion. But they couldn’t come up with a winner.

Instead, they ceded Tuesday’s game to the Wild, losing 2-1 in a shootout after Frederick Gaudreau’s winner. The Isles will go home from a Central Division swing with a 1-0-1 record, still in the top wild-card spot and feeling a tad better about their playoff chances than they did leaving New York.

“Total compete, really a fantastic game,” coach Lane Lambert said. “It’s a shame. It’s a shame we didn’t get two points. We deserved it.”

The Wild found the game-winner after an end-to-end final 25 minutes in which both goaltenders, but particularly Filip Gustavsson, repeatedly came up big for their teams. By that point, a game that had looked tilted to the Isles in the first and to the Wild in the second had settled into a game without much rhythm altogether. This was helter-skelter hockey, and though the Islanders had the better of the chances, they ran into a wall in Gustavsson, who finished with 39 saves to Ilya Sorokin’s 30.

In the shootout, Sorokin broke first, and Kyle Palmieri couldn’t respond for an Islanders team that is still yet to win in a shootout this season, and has only scored once.

“Guys gotta find a way to score,” Lambert said. “It’s them and the goalie. They’ve gotta find a way to score. That’s all there is to it. That’s why.”

The Isles dominated the early goings of the match, scoring the opener when Josh Bailey put home Scott Mayfield’s rebound at 14:15 of the first. But that was the only time they would score in an entertaining first 20 minutes, and after a failed conversion on an odd-man rush, Ryan Reaves took advantage by cleaning up Jordan Greenway’s rebound to tie the game 3:45 after Bailey’s goal.

After that, the Wild quickly asserted control, taking advantage of sloppy defensive-zone play from the Islanders that resulted in long stretches where they got hemmed into their own zone. The Isles reset things after a scoreless second period, but failed to take advantage despite shooting 40 times on Gustavsson.

“In a lot of ways, felt like a playoff game,” Matt Martin said in a nearly empty postgame locker room. “Not a lot of room. A few rushes each way, goalie came up big and at the end of the day, came up short in the skills competition. We play like that, we’ll have success.”

Three points in two games on the road, with a deal that brought Pierre Engvall to the Island being announced before Tuesday’s game, counts as a moderate success, but the Islanders are in a race where they need to get everything possible.

“That’s the way it goes sometimes,” Bailey said.

True enough, but it still stings for the Islanders.

The math will be a problem for them until the end, with Tuesday being the 64th time they took the ice and other contenders holding as many as five games in hand. The Senators, who beat the Red Wings on back-to-back nights in Ottawa on Monday and Tuesday, look like they are turning a six-team race into a seven-team race with their own late entry.

In other words, though the Isles are still in a playoff spot, nothing is safe, even remotely so.

The next five games, starting Saturday with a match at home against Detroit, are all against other teams in the race. That is make-or-break territory for the Islanders.

As for this trip, it was not perfect, but it counts as a step forward.