Coming in with a five-game win streak, the Boston Bruins had a prime opportunity to extend that to six Saturday night. Their opponent, the Columbus Blue Jackets, were involved in a heavy-hitting game the night before in a 2-1 loss to the New York Rangers in Ohio’s capital.

Judging from that scenario, the Black and Gold should’ve established their tempo against a tired Blue Jackets squad. Instead, they went away from basics.

The B’s couldn’t establish a net-front presence against an aggressive Columbus defense. Defensively, the Blue Jackets’ speed wore Boston’s blue-liners down and Tuukka Rask had to bail them out in most instances.

They were playing with fire for most of the night, and it came back to haunt them when Matt Calvert scored the game-winner and added an empty netter late in the third period to seal a 3-1 victory and snap the Bruins’ five-game win streak.

“That’s the style they play, and that’s the way you need to play against them if you want to have success against them,” said Patrice Bergeron, who tallied six of the B’s 35 shots on goal in the losing effort. “You know, disappointing to see tonight and we definitely got the result we deserved with the way that we played.”

During their five-game win streak, the Bruins were doing what they do best – getting to the dirty areas, creating scoring chances and out muscling their opponent. They got away from that on Saturday night as they created little traffic in front of Blue Jackets backup Curtis McElhinney as his defense blocked 15 B’s shots.

The B’s physical edge was also missing as the Blue Jackets had a 33-24 advantage in hits.

A frustrating night for the Black and Gold to say the least as they tried to avenge a 6-2 loss in the last meeting between the Blue Jackets without the likes of Brad Marchand, who was serving his first of his two-game suspension.

“I’m going to be honest here, I’m disappointed,” head coach Claude Julien said about his team’s effort. “I don’t care, six wins in a row or whatever, we just can’t afford to have those kind of outings. Disappointed that we didn’t come to play harder than we did tonight and we wanted to take the easy way out.”

That easy way out for Julien and company was trying to be too cute through the neutral zone and not getting pucks in deep. Aside from the third line of Carl Soderberg, Loui Eriksson and Chris Kelly – the trio that accounted for the only Bruins goal of the night at 11:34 of the first period – the Bruins had trouble trying to establish a forecheck and get anything going.

“We know that’s brought us success in the past. Obviously we didn’t do that tonight,” Kelly said about getting pucks to the gritty areas. “We tried forcing a lot of things and keeping it simple.”

The silver lining in all of this is the Bruins can put this behind them and look ahead to a two-game road trip to Colorado and Dallas – on back-to-back nights – before the All Star break.

That back-to-back against the Stars and Avalanche would be a good time to get back to basics and regain momentum to end the pre-All Star Game slate on a high note.

“We’ve been talking about it a while like we’re going to take every game like it’s the most important game of the year,” said Rask, who made 28 saves in the losing effort. “I’m going back to our old game and how we want to play this game and now we – when the effort is that it’s a huge step back. It’s a tough one to swallow. But, you know, there’s more hockey left so we just have to try to regain that confidence and that work ethic we had there and try to recapture it.