Good Wednesday morning!

• Dan Muse was dead-on.

His Penguins, resolved and resilient as ever, had just put in the better part of three hours on this Tuesday night running all about the rink after the Bruins here at TD Garden, only for the score to stay exactly where it'd been stuck since six minutes following faceoff: Boston 2, Pittsburgh 1.

Me, I kinda liked some of what I saw from the visitors. Especially the very real -- and rare, to an extent -- pushback against an opponent as dogged and defensive-minded as this one.

But Muse, when I brought up afterward whether this might've been encouraging from a coach's perspective, responded with a beauty:

"Yeah, I mean, it got better," he began. "But we're walking out of here without a point. This time of year, you can't walk away and say, 'Hey, it's OK, it was a good effort.' We didn't start the way we wanted to. We've gotta find ways to generate more. We had missed opportunities. Even when we did get in the offensive zone, just to be able to extend plays, to get to the net-front. And look, we're going to have more games like this down the stretch, tight-checking games. It gets harder and harder from this point out. I think we've gotta take some things from this game, learn from them and learn from them quick."

Mm-hm. See what I mean?

And listen, he's right. The Penguins are, as Marco Sturm, Muse's Boston counterpart, would speak here earlier in the day, "not a surprise anymore." They're 31-16-3 on merit, they're second in their division on merit, and they should be well past accepting cookies for a loss well done.

So, if they could let it loose for the final 54 minutes, what stopped them in the first six?

"Our first period wasn't great," Kris Letang would tell me, "so you're kinda chasing after that."

It showed.

But I had a point to make with my question for Muse, and mine might've been right, too: This team has to learn how to overcome opponents like these.

Like what, exactly?

Well, let's whip out the schedule and track all the way back to the Penguins' most recent regulation loss, Feb. 2 against the Senators, that came by precisely the same count, 2-1, and against an opponent that approaches everything precisely the same way: They'll punch, punch, punch, then pull ahead, then pull back ... or even pack it in entirely.

The Penguins' last regulation loss before that?

Yep. Right here. It came Jan. 11, and by a similar count in the Bruins' favor, 1-0.

And as long as I'm at it, Dec. 18 in Ottawa, the Senators shut them out, as well, 4-0.

Not a coincidence. Not remotely new, either. All of this, in fact, precedes Muse and a sizable portion of his roster, meaning the Bruins/Senators thing. Been happening for years. Here, in Canada's capital and, of course, back home. And it's been sustained through multiple changes at all levels of all three organizations.

"Oh, I know," Erik Karlsson, who rose up in Ottawa, would say. "I've been on both sides of it."

Against the Senators, the Penguins are 1-5-3 in the past nine meetings, and they've scored once -- total -- in the past four of those.

Against the Bruins, the Penguins have now lost five in a row and are 2-8-1 in the past 11.

So I'll at least tap a stick or two after this one that they did counter-punch, that they did create three clean breakaways only to have them all stopped by Jeremy Swayman, that they did proceed to out-shoot (35-27) and out-everything else the Bruins the rest of the way. Whereas, for most of the recent past, they'd mustered next to nothing for the full 60.

I broached this with the guy who had the best view:

"Yeah, after the first 10 minutes, I felt we were just able to get our legs underneath us," Stuart Skinner would tell me. "We started giving our push, and it was a really good response from the first 10 minutes that we played. As a group, we should be proud of how we played tonight. Yeah, we just need to start a little bit better."

Here's betting it'll serve them well through the spring.

• Faceoffs were a problem again, as anyone should've expected they'd be in Sidney Crosby's absence. (He was taking more than a third of them, for heaven's sake.) On this night, the Bruins ratioed the Penguins 2:1 at 32-16, and that wasn't helped at all by the re-insertion into the lineup of Kevin Hayes, who'd lose all five of his. 

They're now below 35 percent in each of the past three games.

"Yeah, they’ve been down quite a bit. That’s obvious," Muse would say. "You can’t use that as an excuse. We’re going to keep working with the centers and looking at things. Those guys are putting in work, I know that. We got to win more faceoffs by committee. We can ugly it up, get the wingers in there, get help, you know? Win them by committee, more than just putting that on the center."

That did happen more as the game progressed, for what it's worth, where even official faceoff losses still resulted in Pittsburgh possession.

• Karlsson was magnificent. Premier performer on either side. All over the rink. And his goal, a floater from the right point that Swayman never saw, was the least of it. He registered six shots, attempted 16 -- that's not a misprint -- blocked two and, for good measure, drew a penalty with a dynamic deke.

What a season he's having.

• Egor Chinakhov was almost as visible at times, and he'd register three shots and attempt six. But my goodness, he also passed about a couple others and ... no, kid, just no.

• Skinner was fine, stopping 26 of 28 shots and keeping his side within striking distance all night. But I checked with him, anyway: "Yeah, I felt good. I felt good the whole way through. Just battled. I thought the guys in front of me battled, too, especially obviously just being down one and being able to get all of our PKs done, I mean, that's huge, especially in a tight game like that. It could have easily gone 3-1, and then you're out of the game. But, again, just a really resilient group in here. We're going to learn from our mistakes and be ready to go next game."

• Sturm's decision to challenge the Karlsson goal, presumably because Pittsburgh had one player close enough to Swayman to be considered in the same area code, was hilarious ... and yet not. If I'm an NHL coach, given how badly the league's garbled this guideline, I'd have challenged if that player had been standing in Hartford.

• Still waiting for the first sign of why Sam Girard was acquired. Other than, of course, that sending away Brett Kulak was addition through subtraction.

• This was the Penguins' 10th game this season without Blake Lizotte. They've won ... one.

• Thanks for reading my hockey coverage. Flying back home this morning. Three-game homestand: Sabres, Flyers and these Bruins again. Every game means every game.