PHOTO COURTESY PITTSBURGH PENGUINS

Mike Sullivan’s reaction in the immediate aftermath was as flabbergasting as the Penguins’ just-completed season had been frustrating.

You’d have thought the Pens’ head coach would have had a better perspective, having so recently been in the exact same position.

“It’s a much different feeling this year than it was a year ago,” Sullivan insisted after Wednesday night’s 5-4 loss to the New York Islanders. “The stretch of hockey that we played at the end of the season in dragging ourselves back into the race, I couldn’t have been more proud of the group. So from that standpoint I think it’s a much different feeling.

“The game that we played against Nashville the other night at home might have been the best game we played all year when the stakes were the highest. We simply had to win that game to give ourselves a chance and I thought the guys responded from the drop of the puck. It was just a complete game on both sides of the puck.

“From that standpoint, there’s a good feeling about that. Obviously, we don’t want to be put in the situation that we put ourselves in and there are lessons learned here for all of us and that’s the hard part that we all have to take ownership for, and we will.”

Except they didn’t a year ago, which is why, as far as the playoffs are concerned, the Pens are on the outside looking in.

Again.

Related: Penguins Need to Acknowledge Their Problems Before Solving Them

Many of the problems that doomed the Penguins this season carried over from last season, when the Pens had their playoff fate in their hands but “kind of got frustrated and kind of imploded” (Kris Letang’s words at the time) and lost at home to a woeful Chicago team with two regular-season games remaining.

Their response was to open this season by jumping ahead 2-0 and then surrendering four consecutive goals to what would turn out to be an even worse band of Blackhawks.

We should have known right then and there.

What kept showing up for the five months that followed was bad hockey.

Blown leads, including multiple-goal leads in third periods, a power play that stunk on ice, defensive ineptitude or indifference, an acknowledged lack of discipline and detail, a reluctance to go to the net front at one end and defend it at the other, goals surrendered within the first or last minute of a period, and within a minute or two after the Pens had just scored one, and an inability to grasp or execute how 3-on-3 hockey must be played in overtimes.

All of that is this season’s epitaph.

Former head coach Bob Berry once called his perpetually unreliable players “circus performers” (the rant was a short one yet as good if not better than Michel Therrien’s infamous “They Don’t Care” address, but you have to date back to the 1980s to remember Berry).

If the clown shoes fit …

The Pens almost overcame all of it by going 8-1-3 in the 12 determined and at times painstakingly detailed games that preceded Wednesday night’s meaningless regular-season finale.

Almost.

But since they didn’t, the finishing kick amounted to putting earrings on a pig.

The 4-2 win over Nashville on Monday night that Sullivan referenced to was absolutely, positively what they’d been after all along. In that one they checked every box, to the extent that the Pens looked like a team that not only knew what was required to play playoff hockey but also might actually be capable of applying it with a degree of success in the postseason.

The same had been the case in a 4-1 win over Carolina on March 26 at home.

But the 8-1-3 stretch run that inspired such pride began with the Pens turning a 4-0 lead with less than 5 minutes remaining in the second period into a 5-4 overtime loss at Colorado. It included letting a 3-1 lead over Columbus with 11:01 left in the third period degenerate into a 4-3 loss in a shootout. And it was composed in part by a 5-4 overtime win over Detroit that’s memorable because the Pens couldn’t hold a two-goal lead over the final 13 minutes of regulation and in the process ceded a critical point to the Red Wings, who were in hot pursuit of the same playoff spot the Pens were after.

They should have known better.

They do know better.

And, as they established once they finally got desperate enough, they were capable of better.

Probably not of Cup contention, but certainly of making the playoffs and, perhaps, making a little noise upon arrival.

“In the grand scheme of things, when you think about it, it almost stinks worse,” Bryan Rust admitted. “We wish we would have had it earlier and for a lot more stretches this year.”