Five games in and the Bruins are still looking for that elusive first goal.

As in that elusive first goal of the game.

For three of their five games, the Bruins overcame their early 1-0 deficit. Against Columbus on opening night, they allowed the first two goals but their first line of David Backes, Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak put the team on their back en route to the 6-3 victory. Against Winnipeg, the Bruins responded to Blake Wheeler’s breakaway just seconds later and followed through with a 4-1 win to close out the road trip. Three nights later, the B’s trailed 1-0 in the third but Marchand and a returning Patrice Bergeron came through with late-game heroics to beat the Devils, 2-1, in the TD Garden opener.

In two instances, however, the Bruins were in chase mode. Last Saturday, the Maple Leafs speed was too much to handle as the team celebrated their 100th anniversary in Toronto. Exactly one week later, the B’s had problems with another skill and speed team, the hated Canadiens, resulting in a 4-2 loss at TD Garden.

Simply put, playing from behind as frequently as they have over the first five games. The last thing that they need is for that to become a habit.

“Absolutely. It’s definitely concerning,” said defenseman Torey Krug, who fired just one shot in 22:29 of ice time and was a minus-3 on Saturday. “You want to make sure that it doesn’t become a habit. Part of the makeup of this team is you want to come out [and score first]. We’ve had a couple of decent starts, but we’re not scoring goals and we’re not playing with the lead, so we have to make sure that we put an end to this thing.”

The starts themselves haven’t been all that bad. Despite tallying just six shots on goal in the first period, the Bruins put pressure on Carey Price and came out with a little bit of a jump.

Then the second period came where the Bruins were flat out…well, flat. Passes were missing the mark, transition was not smooth, the defense was breaking down and the quality chances were going towards Anton Khudobin.

By the end of the second, the Bruins foundthemselves down 2-0 thanks to Brendan Gallagher’s one-timer from the slot (his third of the season) and Phillip Danault burying Alex Radulov’s feed on a 2-on-1 for his first in 2016-17.

“It’s definitely something we have to work on,” Bergeron said about playing from behind and scoring first. “I thought today we had a good first period, but it was the second that definitely hurt us, and like you said, they scored and got momentum in the second. But I thought our start was much better.”

The next chance the Bruins have at scoring first comes Tuesday when the Minnesota Wild come to town to conclude the three-game homestand. One can assure that scoring first will be atop the list on the Bruins’ bulletin board over the next two games.

“I hope its not a habit,” head coach Claude Julien stated. “It’s certainly not what we’re looking for, but there’s no doubt, the amount of games that we played — five games — we haven’t scored first. We talked about that this morning trying to get that first goal and it hasn’t happened yet.”