The Rangers are headed back to Tampa with their season on life support.

In dropping their third straight game to the Lightning — a 3-1 defeat thanks to a go-ahead goal late in the third period from Ondrej Palat in Game 5 Thursday night at Madison Square Garden — the Rangers will have to win the next two contests to have any hope of a Stanley Cup Final berth.

The Rangers may have faced and overcome a 3-2 deficit in the last two series, but those weren’t against the defending back-to-back champions, who are now one win away from their third straight appearance in the Cup Final.

For the second time in the last three games, Palat scored in the final two minutes of regulation to secure the win. This one came with 1:50 left on the clock and just minutes after Ryan Strome missed a golden opportunity on a wide-open net.

The Rangers had a chance for the go-ahead goal when Andrew Copp sent a backhanded feed past Lightning defenseman Zach Bogosian, but the pass was a little behind Strome and the second-line center couldn’t get all of his stick on it.

“I think there’s times where I’m trying to put the puck to the net and maybe it’s not the right play, maybe there’s another play to be made or a simpler [play] to be made,” Copp said. “We got a lot of good offensive players and we’ve seen a lot of those plays work. Playoff time, pucks to the net.

“You see all three goals are relatively harmless shots that kind of find their way with the screens and the traffic, tips or whatever. I think as a mindset, in general, we want to get more pucks to the net.”

Had Copp connected with Strome for what would have been the go-ahead goal at that time, or any of the other similar plays, this might be a very different story. Instead, the Rangers look like they had a case of the too-many-passes and were held to just a single goal for the second game in a row.

It’s true, the officiating was all over the place, including an egregious no-call on a headlock that Jan Rutta put Kaapo Kakko in late in the third period. It prompted the Garden crowd to tell the referees what they thought of them. Spoiler: It wasn’t kind.

So did head coach Gerard Gallant think the Rangers should’ve gotten more than just the one power play that they did?

“I did, I really did,” he said. “In saying that, I thought they did an excellent game. They let the teams play enough. I thought we could’ve had a couple more, there’s no doubt.”

Missed opportunities and missed penalties aside, however, the Rangers didn’t do enough offensively to outplay the Lightning.

Ryan Lindgren scored the Rangers’ lone goal off a long shot from the left wing that snuck by Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, who gave up a five-on-five goal for the first time since Game 2. But Tampa Bay scored three unanswered, one from Mikhail Sergachev, one from Palat and an empty-netter from Brandon Hagel, to become the first team in this series to win on the road.

There may have been two shorthanded stretches and one power play for the Rangers, but no member of the Kid Line saw more than 11:03 of ice time at even strength. The trio of Alexis Lafreniere, Filip Chytil and Kakko also only had four shifts in the middle frame.

Granted, Chytil also struggled on faceoffs. The Czech center won just 2 of 9 (22.2 percent), which also probably played into the third line’s lack of ice time. Both Chytil and Mika Zibanejad, who went 7 of 16 at the dots, were dominated on faceoffs.

“Just the way I coached the game,” said Gallant, who added that there wasn’t any specific reason for the kids’ lower time on ice. “Trying to match up a little bit. They played OK.”

Gallant did opt to scratch Ryan Reaves for the first time in these playoffs in favor of Kevin Rooney, who gave the fourth line a speedier look without the veteran enforcer. There were some extracurricular activities after the final horn that the Rangers could’ve used Reaves for, but the matchup with the Lightning’s fourth line was largely effective.

Still, the Rangers are now on the brink of elimination for a sixth time this postseason. They’ll have to hand Tampa Bay just its second loss at home in the playoffs — and the first since Game 3 of the first round against Toronto — to send this Eastern Conference Final series back to the Garden for a Game 7.

The Rangers have overcome greater odds in the last month or so, but the Lightning seem to make their own luck.

“We’ve been down 3-2 every series so far,” Copp said. “We have to have a level of desperation. I think the confidence of doing it before is bigger and better than having to do it again. I think there’s the belief in the room.”