It was on course to be one of the best wins of the Islanders’ season. Instead, Monday night turned into one of their worst losses. 

Thirty minutes into the match, the Islanders held a commanding three-goal lead over the Capitals and looked to be in prime position to take what was effectively a four-point game against their close rivals in the Metropolitan Division. A win on Monday would have put their recent struggles behind them. It would have made a .500 record on a season-long five-game homestand the minimum, and something of a statement win after a rough start to 2023. 

Instead, the rough start to the new year got rougher. The Islanders blew that three-goal lead in short order as Alex Ovechkin’s second-period hit on Jean-Gabriel Pageau changed the tenor of the match and set the tone for a stunning four-goal comeback that ended in a 4-3 loss at UBS Arena on Dmitry Orlov’s winning goal in overtime. 

“We’re putting ourselves in tough spots sometimes,” captain Anders Lee said. “And it bit us tonight. This is a frustrating loss for sure.” 

The hit on Pageau came 6:35 into the second period, as Ovechkin followed an unsuccessful power play by running the Islanders center into the boards, crashing his shoulder into Pageau’s head. Though the Islanders had been controlling the game, the ice quickly tilted in the opposite direction, and at 10:01, Garnet Hathaway scooted a puck underneath Ilya Sorokin’s pads to begin the comeback. A hair over three minutes later with the teams playing at four-on-four, Tom Wilson roofed a puck from the crease after the Islanders lost track of him. 

It went to the final period 3-2, and with Pageau returning to the game late in the second, the hope was that the Islanders had weathered the worst of the storm. But it’s the hope that kills you, and the Islanders could not stem the tide. 

“I don’t think that hit necessarily [changed the game] but I think their physical play [did],” Hudson Fasching, who scored a second-period goal to put the Islanders ahead 3-0, said. “They were pissed off after we went up 3-0 and started playing a lot more physical.” 

T.J. Oshie deflected Erik Gustafsson’s shot from the left point past Sorokin 5:56 into the third to tie it and the atmosphere at UBS Arena went downright glum. 

The Islanders hung on until overtime, when Orlov notched the game-winner to salvage a point as Mathew Barzal lost him on a give-and-go sequence with Oshie. But it should have been two points. Not only did the Islanders hold a 3-0 lead, but Pageau was denied early in OT by Darcy Kuemper on a breakaway chance that had him in all alone. 

“Obviously you go up 3-0 in the game, gotta find a way to close it out,” Noah Dobson told The Post. “Unfortunately we didn’t. … We sat back a little in the second, they capitalized.” 

Though the Islanders earned a badly needed win over Montreal on Saturday, this would have put them in position to hop the Capitals in the standings, as they hold a game in hand over Washington. And with the Islanders’ record an abysmal 2-4-2 since the calendar turned to 2023, a win over the bottom-feeding Canadiens won’t boost anyone’s spirits if they follow it with a collapse like Monday’s. 

Coach Lane Lambert, hiding his anger underneath a sheen of politeness, was questioned afterward on both the team’s toughness and whether the roster has enough finishing with the offense struggling. Forty-five games into the season, it is not ideal that either of those things can be questioned. 

In response to the team’s toughness, he cited Matt Martin’s 10 hits in what was a physically played game throughout. As to the Islanders finishing, he said, “Absolutely. … We’ve been creating opportunities. There’s certain guys that have been in droughts and they’ll come out of them.” 

“I think we just gotta play hard,” Fasching said. “We can’t let them dictate the game with physical play. I think we’re a strong team and we can play through that for sure.” 

The Islanders have been lucky in the sense that the Capitals and Penguins have both struggled as well, both teams failing to put any distance between them in the standings despite the Islanders playing some of their worst hockey all year. Both Washington and Pittsburgh, though, got wins on Monday, and the Penguins hopped the Islanders in the standings with theirs. 

Those teams won’t struggle forever. 

And the Islanders’ season is right back on tilt.