TAMPA, Fla. -- There weren't outward signs of anger after the Penguins' fourth loss in a row and fifth loss in six games. Nor was there an outpouring of bewilderment.

Yet definitive answers weren't forthcoming, either.

"It's kind of like we're just showing up and -- I don't want to say expecting to win because you do have to have kind of a confidence or swagger that you expect to win, but I think right now we think we're good enough to show up and beat whoever we play, and we're not," defenseman Brooks Orpik said yesterday after the Penguins folded in a 3-1 loss to Tampa Bay at the St. Pete Times Forum to match their longest skein of the season.

"I don't know how good we are, to be honest. I think early in the season we got lucky with a lot of games in a lot of different aspects. Maybe it's catching up to us. I guess that's the best way to describe the picture -- the level of desperation isn't what it needs to be."

That's showing in several ways. The Penguins continue to fall behind -- they gave up the first goal for the 24th time in 42 games -- but are not staging the comebacks that made for some dramatic victories the first couple of months of the season.

They were 0 for 4 on a power play that already ranked last in the NHL. They spent too much time chasing the Lightning around in the neutral zone and Tampa's offensive zone, getting outshot, 37-26.

"Stretches like this, it's frustration," said veteran winger Bill Guerin, who tied the score, 1-1, for the Penguins at 17:15 of the first period after Tampa's Martin St. Louis opened the scoring just 1:03 into the opening period. The Lightning ran off unanswered goals by Zenon Konopka, Vincent Lecavalier and Steve Downie after that.

"You just have to take a step back and get back to basics," Guerin said. "The more you press, the more you try to do, the worse you're going to make it. You've got to realize how teams go through this every year. They go through it all the time. We had a stretch like this earlier in the year, with all the injuries.

"If we try to change our game or change the way we play, we're just going to hurt ourselves."

He didn't sense the team was pressing in this particular game.

"Not tonight," Guerin said. "Tonight, maybe we just didn't have our heads on the right way."

Why not?

"Certainly, we have to ask ourselves those questions," Penguins coach Dan Bylsma said. "We know that's not our best game."

Bylsma and Orpik cited upsets in the team's routine with holiday activities and reduced practice time as a possible reason for the malaise lately.

"The urgency level should be there if it hasn't been -- and maybe it hasn't been, looking at the record over the last few games," Bylsma said. "It's the time of the year when maybe that focus can wane and maybe it hasn't been there."

Orpik, who filled in for injured defenseman Sergei Gonchar as an alternate captain, was harsher in his assessment.

"One thing is priorities," he said. "I think hockey's got to be, besides your family, your top priority. For some reason right now, I don't want to speak for everyone, but I think everyone has to maybe re-evaluate where their priorities are right now."

Team captain Sidney Crosby said the players are making the effort -- "It's never really a question of that," he said -- but are frustrated by not getting the results to show for it.

"Our game has got to be better," Crosby said. "There's no real excuses. There's no common problems. We're not executing, and we're paying the price for it.

"It's been different things every game. A common thing for us throughout is that we haven't spent enough time in the other teams' zone."

Those different things all seemed to surface at once against the Lightning.

"It might have been different things in the games before this," Penguins defenseman Martin Skoula said, "but tonight it was everything. In all the situations, at some point of the game, we got outplayed."

The Penguins play their fourth road game in a row today at Florida, then come home for games this week against Atlanta and Philadelphia before embarking on a monster trip -- five games that stretch from Toronto to Vancouver over eight days.

Orpik can't wait, and he's not sure his teammates can, either.

"Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, maybe getting on a long road trip is what we need," he said.

Penguins Plus, a blog by Dave Molinari and Shelly Anderson, is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.