EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — It was a special day, the kind the Islanders don’t get very often. Before 79,690 fans, they played 50 good minutes. Occasionally great minutes.

“Five-on-five,” Patrick Roy said afterward, “that’s the way we want to play.”

But the room — not the home locker room at UBS Arena but the Giants locker room at MetLife Stadium — still felt the same as it has after so many games this season. The looks were the same: Downcast, searching for answers after a game that was squarely in the Islanders’ control ended with the other team celebrating a win.

The Islanders blew another multi-goal lead. They took careless penalties. Their league-worst penalty kill surrendered a pair of six-on-four goals with five minutes to go. And they still sit below the playoff cut line. There are 28 games to go, a third of the season still to play, but every blown lead and gut-punch loss puts the Islanders farther and farther from where they want to be.

“It just sucks,” Mathew Barzal said after the 6-5 overtime loss to the Rangers. “I thought we played well.”

Barzal took one of the three minors in the final 9:24 that helped turn a 5-3 lead into a game that headed to overtime. His hook on K’Andre Miller during four-on-four play could have easily been overlooked, but it wasn’t — and it gave the Rangers a much more dangerous four-on-three power play with 5:44 to go. The Rangers pulled Igor Shesterkin for a five-on-three that the Islanders managed to escape, but six-on-four they could not.

Then Scott Mayfield, who’d already taken two penalties on Sunday, took yet another — this one a clear trip on Alexis Lafrenière as the Rangers entered the zone with 2:28 to go and just as they were pulling Shesterkin for a six-on-five edge.

Mayfield, in the first season of a seven-year deal, has been a mainstay for years to be on the ice for penalty kills and to protect leads. He’s been on for four goals with the opposition net empty and is tied for second with 15 minor penalties taken this season. It’s been a mess for him.

And the sequence leading to Mika Zibanejad’s tying goal with 1:29 to play was excruciating. Ryan Pulock went up the wall after a faceoff, couldn’t force the puck out of the zone and immediately got picked off by a Ranger. Adam Pelech blocked a shot but the puck went straight to the corner to Lafrenière, who started the play that Zibanejad finished.

They weren’t traditional power-play goals against but they still count. The Islanders gave up three on Sunday, dropping their penalty-kill success rate to 70.7 percent. It’s been 39 years since a team had a worse penalty-kill percentage for an entire season.

“As a (penalty) killer, it stinks,” Casey Cizikas said. “We take a lot of pride in what we do and being out there in those situations … It’s hard. We’re battling, we’re trying stuff.”

RANGERS WIN IT IN OVERTIME!#NYR | #StadiumSeries pic.twitter.com/nSUrr0dY0E

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The Ringling Bros. overtime finish, with Noah Dobson’s giveaway, his slide into the net and having the winner go off him, then Ilya Sorokin and into a dislodged net, just put a ridiculous cap to another unbelievable night. The Islanders hadn’t blown a multi-goal lead since Jan. 2 but it’s the 14th time it’s happened this season. And they’re now 5-1-8 in those games, a litany of lost points that could have them sitting up closer to the first-place Rangers rather than the 13th-place Sabres.

Roy, as he’s done after every one of the nine games he’s coached so far, chose the glass-half-full approach after the game. “As a coach, because I’m not a player, I feel good about our game,” he said. “The penalties at the end hurt us, but we did a lot of good things. I thought we played (at) a good pace … It’s a very positive thing for us.”

He may surely not feel the same behind closed doors. Roy took his team to task after their lifeless 2-1 shootout loss to the Kraken on Tuesday, conducting a minicamp of sorts over the past week to keep his team’s conditioning up while also trying to emphasize the aggressiveness up and down the ice he’s been trying to instill.

Despite a goal on the first shot against just 88 seconds in on Sunday, his Islanders responded. They reeled off three in 4:16 in the early going of the first, rattling Shesterkin, the Rangers and the predominantly Rangers fan crowd. Even when the Rangers turned a 4-1 deficit into a 4-3 nailbiter after two periods, the Islanders started the third on their toes, extending the lead after a fortunate sequence where Ryan Lindgren was down in the corner, bleeding from a follow-through stick to the face from Alexander Romanov while Romanov deposited a puck into an open net untouched in front.

They had it. Then, they didn’t. It’s not breaking news anymore this season.

“We’re playing the way we want to play,” Barzal said. “Just a matter of some tough breaks, penalties, mine was a bad one … It’s just tough.”

The Islanders went into a special place to play Sunday. They put the distractions and the fanfare aside and played a good game. At times, a great game.

But the demons that plagued them long before Roy came on the scene reared up again. And you all know how that ends.

(Photo: Dennis Schneidler / USA Today)