With two minutes to go in their season opener, the Islanders looked on their way to putting last year’s late-game struggles to bed, having seemingly completed a comeback on Maxim Tsyplakov’s first-ever NHL goal.

But when the night ended, Game 1 of 2024-25 felt a lot like Game 83 of 2023-24, with the Islanders having let that lead go to waste, ultimately losing in overtime, 5-4, to the Utah Hockey Club on Dylan Guenther’s game-winning goal.

It all gave off a bad feeling of déjâ vu, right down to the locker room, where Noah Dobson said, “Anytime you score a big goal, the next shift’s huge.

Those are moments in the game you gotta manage.”

The Islanders couldn’t manage them last year.

They couldn’t manage them Thursday night, twice taking the lead and twice letting Utah tie the game before their own goal was announced to the UBS Arena crowd.

Big picture, this opener offered a mixed bag in which the Islanders, as a whole, didn’t play the sort of hockey their preseason promised.

There were early issues at five-on-five, with the breakouts, in particular, were out of sync, with Scott Mayfield and Mike Reilly trading turnovers on misfired D-to-D passes in the first period, and the top six that looked so good in exhibitions didn’t get into a rhythm until late in the game.

And once those got sorted, there was the power play that scored just once in 10:56 at five-on-four and a penalty kill that coughed up a pair of goals in just 1:40 on the ice.

But it was the two blown leads in the third period, followed by the inevitable overtime letdown, that felt so familiar.

“Twice, we gave them a chance to come back in that game,” coach Patrick Roy said. “Secondly, there was part of the game where I thought we were a little sloppy and we turned over pucks and then they took advantage of it.”

That was echoed among the players, who almost uniformly said they hadn’t shown their best.

“I think we didn’t get off to a good enough start,” said Anthony Duclair, who scored his first Islander goal on a first-period power play. “I think that was key. We were putting the road team in the game right away. Sloppy plays. I think we were trying to be too cute and then finding our legs in the second there. It’s just tough to blow a lead late in the third period like that.”

Thanks in equal parts to Semyon Varlamov, the amount of time spent on the power play and Utah’s own early-season kinks, the Islanders came into the last 20 minutes facing only a 2-1 deficit, with a chance to rewrite the story of the night.

When Bo Horvat’s tying goal within two minutes of the third was followed by Jean-Gabriel Pageau scoring shorthanded on a brilliant hustle play, chasing the puck down the ice and tapping it in after Simon Holmstrom’s initial shot, it looked like they would do just that.

But the lead didn’t even last the rest of the penalty kill, as Guenther quickly tied the game back up. And when the Islanders got a 4-minute power-play opportunity of their own shortly thereafter, they came up empty.

The third period, at least, looked a lot better at five-on-five than the first two, and it looked like the Islanders had won it when Tsyplakov scored with 2:07 to go for a 4-3 lead.

But immediately off the faceoff, the Islanders blew a coverage, Josh Doan chased down the puck and tied the game just 13 seconds later.

In overtime came the inevitable as Guenther finished a three-on-one rush after an Islanders turnover.

“Last year is last year. This is a new year,” Ryan Pulock said.

It didn’t feel that way.