The Florida Panthers were hoping to carry the momentum of their win at the Boston Bruins on Tuesday — the lone highlight of an otherwise disappointing five-game road trip — into their homestand opener against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Thursday.

It didn’t happen, although they made a push late.

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The Panthers never led in their 5-3 loss to the Penguins at Amerant Bank Arena to kick off four consecutive games at home over the next two weeks.

Florida falls to 4-5-0 as it continues to look for consistency while playing without key players in Aleksander Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk, Tomas Nosek and Dmitry Kulikov. Pittsburgh improves to 6-2-0.

“We all feel like we need to step up and be a little bit better,” said veteran winger Brad Marchand, who scored twice for Florida on Thursday. “Obviously, we’re missing a lot of really key guys in the lineup, and it falls on all of us to do a little bit more. Sometimes goes your way. Sometimes it doesn’t.”

The Panthers were down 2-0 early after a first-period power-play goal from Sidney Crosby 6:24 into the first period and Rickard Rakell 6:36 into the second period.

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Florida made multiple pushes after that to cut its deficit to one goal but never got closer than that.

8:26 into the second period: Marchand deflected a Mackie Samoskevich pass past Pittsburgh goaltender Tristan Jarry on the power play to get Florida within 2-1 … only for Thomas Novak to extend the Penguins’ lead back to two goals seven minutes later on a one-timer from the left circle.

2:24 into the third period: Sam Reinhart scores on the power play, with his wrist shot making the Panthers’ deficit 3-2 … only for Connor Dewar to score two minutes and 25 seconds later on his own wrist shot to make it 4-2 Pittsburgh.

And then 11:06 into the third period: Marchand scores his second goal of the game on a backhanded shot off an Eetu Luostarinen feed to make it 4-3 … only for Crosby to score his second power-play goal 43 seconds later to make it 5-3 Penguins.

“In the first half of the game, we looked like we’ve looked for a while,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “I mean, we offensively were just slow. And then in the back half of the game, we got to the right pace. And there’s a little bit of freedom. We’ve just been really tight with the puck, and we’ve turned pucks over that we normally don’t or don’t expect that we should. We just got to a level of intensity, but with the puck and then we looked the way we were supposed to look.”

Florida out-shot Pittsburgh 31-9 over the final two periods.

“After the first period, we really controlled that game,” said Marchand, who leads the team with five goals and 10 points. “It just seemed like every time we pushed, they’d make one play. But when you have the caliber players that they do, some of the best ever play the game, that’s what they do. They know how to show up in those moments and take advantage opportunities, and that’s what they did.”

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Panthers goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky gave up five goals on 16 shots against. Jarry made 34 saves for Pittsburgh.

Florida next hosts the Vegas Golden Knights on Saturday (6 p.m., Scripps Sports).