The Rangers couldn’t be full steam ahead for the entire final stretch of the season.

And so the in-game resolve and resiliency they had shown in the previous few weeks came out too little, too late in a 5-2 loss to the Penguins on Monday night at Madison Square Garden, bringing the Blueshirts’ impressive five-game win streak to a halt.

It was the Rangers’ fifth loss since the start of March, when the club went 10-3-1 while facing some of the top teams in the NHL.

The Penguins, who were ranked 22nd in the league and second-to-last in the Metropolitan Division at the start of the game, are not the team they were just two seasons ago — when they lost a 3-1 series lead on the Rangers in the first round of the 2022 playoffs.

But Pittsburgh looked like a team fighting for its pride, while the Rangers didn’t look like they were fighting for anything at all.

“It seemed like it wasn’t our night overall,” Jimmy Vesey said. “Can’t spot a team two goals and expect to win in this league. I think going down two that early kind of changes the whole dynamic of the game. You’re chasing the game and that kind of opens it up a little bit. Just a few too many mistakes tonight.”

The Rangers chased the puck all night.

There wasn’t much — if any — emotion in their game.

That hindered their physicality and allowed the Penguins to have their way for a majority of the night.

Head coach Peter Laviolette called it a typical Pittsburgh game, in which the Penguins “mucked it up pretty good” behind a three-point night from their captain, Sidney Crosby.

Despite the fact that two of the Penguins’ goals were scored on an empty net, the Rangers have now given up five goals in three of their past four contests.

Even though the Rangers generated a bit of a push in the third period, when Kaapo Kakko and Jack Roslovic scored in the span of 6:11 to make it a one-goal game with just over three minutes left, the Penguins never really lost control of the game.

It was all but handed to the visitors 18 seconds in by the Rangers’ captain, Jacob Trouba, whose defensive-zone giveaway ended up in the back of Igor Shesterkin’s net on his first shift.

“It’s a big mistake that cost us a big goal in the game,” Trouba said. “That can’t happen, it’s not on anybody but me.”

The Rangers had one of their worst periods in a while through the game’s opening 20 minutes.

Falling behind 2-0 on goals from Bryan Rust and Crosby, the Blueshirts were all out of sorts in the defensive zone and could not generate much of anything in the offensive zone.

The Rangers even challenged the Crosby goal for offside, but lost and had to go down a man.

In their second game back as a defensive pairing, Trouba and K’Andre Miller were on for three of the Penguins’ five goals.

Trouba’s defensive-zone giveaway that led to Rust’s 1-0 score was the first of the nine turnovers the Rangers were charged with in the first period alone.

The Rangers finished with a whopping 11 giveaways on the night to the Penguins’ one.

It could’ve been a different game if Mika Zibanejad’s score on an early power play in the second period counted, but the refs immediately waved it off for goalie interference.

Chris Kreider’s right skate got in the way of Penguins goalie Alex Nedeljkovic on the play.

“They called it off, so they said no,” Laviolette said. “I didn’t challenge it. I thought that Kreids was doing a great job in front, but his feet were in the paint, got tangled up in his pad. I think being in the paint was the determining factor for me.”