The last time the Boston Bruins lost in regulation it was to the Columbus Blue Jackets by a score of 6-2. It was an embarrassment. Niklas Svedberg was pulled and the defense was in disarray.

With the same Blue Jackets team coming to town Saturday night, one figured the Black and Gold would be ready for revenge. That wasn’t the case as the Blue Jackets scored two late goals to prevail 3-1.

The common theme in the locker room after the game was poor decision making, lack of preparation and not winning battles.

The B’s put themselves in a hole early on as Ryan Johansen extended his point streak to 13 games after scoring a power-play goal beating Tuukka Rask on a wrist shot top corner. But, minutes later Carl Soderberg nodded the score with his 10th goal of the year and all was well for Claude Julien’s team.

The second period started and the B’s were back to their bad habits they committed during their poor run of games. They were being too cute with the puck looking for the extra pass instead of putting it on net. They were not generating any traffic towards Curtis McElhinney and were simply just being outworked by their opposition – a trend established in Columbus a month ago.

On Boston.com: Bruins Get Away From Basics

“I didn’t like our second, obviously our third,” Julien said about his team’s effort during his postgame press conference. “It was one of those nights and you’re right, we didn’t want to put in the dirty work. We were trying to be cute and they do a pretty good job. They have some pretty good D’s and they box out well. Our guys weren’t willing to put in the work to get to the front of the net, so their goaltender saw a lot of shots. Even in the battles, they won more battles than we did, so they were a more determined team than we were.”

“I am disappointed. I’m going to be honest here, I’m disappointed,” Julien added. “I don’t care, six wins in a row whatever, we just can’t afford to have those kinds of outings. Disappointed that we didn’t come to play harder than we did tonight and we wanted to take the easy way out.”

The B’s were a shadow of themselves tonight after winning five straight. A dejected Zdeno Chara stared off into the distance looking for answers.

“They out battled us,” Chara said. “They won the races for pucks and battles.”

As bad as the home town team played, it was a 1-1 tie with three minutes left in regulation until Matt Calvert was left alone behind the defense where the puck slid through right to his stick where he then tapped it past Rask for the game-winner. Calvert also added an empty-netter for the dagger earning First star honors.

Milan Lucic circled back to the idea of the team maybe letting their guard down with the Blue Jackets in town who were losers of four straight.

“You know it just seemed like we weren’t really committed to doing the things that we needed to do, especially in the hard areas,” Lucic said. “In order to get that win here tonight. It ends up costing us with a loss here.”

Between poor decision making, lack of willingness to work and not generating traffic, this is the B’s team we saw a month ago where they were not getting any results. On Saturday, they were back to their old ways in the final 40 minutes.

Luckily for Julien and company, they won’t have to see the Blue Jackets for the rest of the 2014-2015 season. Instead they can turn their attention to the final two games before the All Star break – in Dallas and Colorado – and hope to end their pre All Star game slate on a high note.