For a moment, this looked encouraging. More than encouraging, it looked like the Islanders could fight back with the same resilience they had a couple months ago, before this season fell off its moorings. It looked like, after an abysmal start, this might be the game where they started to turn the ship back around.

How naive.

Carolina crushed those hopes and sent the Islanders to their last road trip before the All-Star break recipients of a 5-2 loss on the back of a Sebastian Aho hat trick. Their horrible month is not over yet, and it is now eight losses in nine games, with four more to play and the playoffs feeling like a distant possibility.

“I think we still have a confident group,” Brock Nelson said. “I still think we all believe in here and know we can get the job done.”

It just keeps getting worse, and it is starting to get to where you have to wonder whether the famously trigger-happy general manager will consider making a change. The Islanders are meant to be buyers on March 3, but at this rate, they will be out of the race by then.

Coach Lane Lambert said afterward he still feels like his message is getting through to the team, a sentiment backed up by Nelson. But he did admit that some of the struggles are on the coaching staff.

“I think everything that happens within the game, whether it be five-on-five, whether it be offensively, whether it be power play, whether it be penalty kill, that all falls on the coaching staff at some point in one way, shape or form,” he said. “There’s no question that everyone looks in the mirror, myself included.”

For a splendid moment lasting 1:40, the Islanders showed some fight. That was when Simon Holmstrom came up with a brilliant individual effort to shoot the puck between Brett Pesce’s legs and in, then Nelson followed up Holmstrom’s goal with a wraparound of his own late in the first period. A 2-0 deficit and listless start were erased, and a crowd that had booed the Islanders within minutes of puck drop was energized.

But they wouldn’t go home happy.

Aho put the Hurricanes ahead, 3-2, when he redirected Teuvo Teravainen’s feed off the rush 16:40 into the second. The energy the Islanders played with for that 1:40 quickly evaporated as the game turned into a dull, low-event affair — and not the kind that the Isles used to thrive on.

When Aho scored again, taking the puck off the Islanders’ Sebastian Aho and finishing 7:09 into the third to make it 4-2, it ended any lingering hopes of a comeback. The death rattle was complete when Aho finished the hat trick with an empty-net goal.

The Islanders’ power-play opportunities yet again sucked away all their momentum as their 3-for-54 run at five-on-four looks as hopeless as the National Debt Clock. The Penguins, who won Friday, are now two points ahead of the Islanders with three games in hand, and the Sabres are closing in fast — two points behind with two games in hand. And the Panthers hopped over them by beating Minnesota.

The Hurricanes scored twice within four minutes on Saturday, with Jordan Staal redirecting a Jalen Chatfield shot in after just 44 seconds and then mugging Alexander Romanov at the blue line and feeding Jesper Fast on the rush 3:52 into the night.

It got better from there. Enough to avoid embarrassment. Not enough to avoid a loss.

“I think you have to stay positive,” Josh Bailey said. “I think it still hurts, we’re competitive, we want to win and really that’s where we’re at right now. We gotta find a way to win.”

With Cal Clutterbuck and Hudson Fasching the latest additions to the injured list — and with Clutterbuck’s absence described as indefinite on Saturday morning — the Isles desperately need the All-Star break to come. A reset might let them begin to figure out their issues, or even just take a breath amid a stretch of losing that has sucked up all the oxygen in their dressing room, and with it the morale.

They won’t get it. At least not yet.

There are still four games left between now and then. That might be the worst part.