PITTSBURGH — This is not every other time the Islanders have been pushed against a wall, because this time if they can’t push back, it all ends.
This season that has been a franchise revitalization is now on the brink of extermination, a 4-0 Game 5 loss to the Penguins Thursday night at the CONSOL Energy Center leaving the Islanders down 3-2 in this best-of-seven series with Game 6 Saturday night at the Coliseum.
“Our lives are on the line now, so we have no excuses and not much breathing room,” center John Tavares said. “We just need to go out and focus on one game.”
The Islanders are in this predicament strangely enough because of a 36-year-old backup goalie named Tomas Vokoun, who played his first postseason game in six years and might have just revived all of the Penguins’ realistic wants for a Stanley Cup. Coming in for the struggling Marc-Andre Fleury, Vokoun made 31 stops and recorded his second career shutout in the playoffs, now raising his spring record to 4-8-0.
“He played well, but we didn’t challenge him enough, at all,” said defenseman Brian Strait, trying to hold his own in 21:19 of ice time while top-pair man Andrew MacDonald was sidelined with a broken hand that will keep him out the remainder of the playoffs. “We didn’t get in his face enough.”
Vokoun’s counterpart, Evgeni Nabokov, didn’t exactly fare the same. He was yanked for rookie Kevin Poulin with 14:17 remaining in the game after giving up his fourth goal on 27 shots, a power-play one-timer to Kris Letang. It was a similar situation to what happened in Game 1, when Nabokov was pulled with the same score (only it being the second period) en route to a 5-0 shellacking.
The big question now resides with Islanders coach Jack Capuano, able to see the difference in the Penguins with their backup goalie in, and having not gotten any sort of noteworthy performances from Nabokov in this postseason thus far.
“It’s something that we’ll think about,” Capuano said. “But I have confidence in Nabby. A lot of guys played some minutes tonight, we tried to distribute them accordingly and [it’s] no different with the Nabokov situation.”
Whatever that means, the point is that swaths of time like the second period cannot continue to happen no matter who’s in goal if the Islanders want to see a Game 7, which would be back here on Sunday. With 7:25 gone by in the frame, Tyler Kennedy cherry-picked behind defenseman Radek Martinek and took a great headman pass from Letang, roofing a wrist shot for a 1-0 lead. Just 82 seconds later, Douglas Murray lofted one on goal that Nabokov botched with his glove for a 2-0 lead that ignited the 18,636 and sent their white towels a-swirling.
“I think we were good up until they scored the second goal,” Nabokov said, having allowed the third goal on a highlight-reel move from Sidney Crosby just over five minutes after the second. “We were flat after that.”
What came after the game was the realization that things are no longer rosy, that these upstart Islanders could see their good story come to an inglorious end as quickly as it appeared.
“Our backs have been against the wall before and we’ve been a resilient team,” Capuano said. “We got to win a game back home now.”
bcyrgalis@nypost.com