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TAMPA — There’s little doubt Brad Marchand will hang onto the egregious no-call on his breakaway opportunity late in a Game 2 loss in Tampa and let it fuel the little ball of anger roiling inside him, fuel it all the way to the puck drop of Game 3 Wednesday night at TD Garden. And there’s similarly little chance the rest of the Bruins won’t have departed Florida’s sunny shores without a hint of regret for the slow start, the sluggish early play, and the occasional lack of physicality and offensive aggressiveness that led to their 4-2 loss in the second-round playoff series with the Lightning.

But there’s something else the Bruins will take home with them to Boston, and when you peel away the layer of frustration that comes with a night when so many things didn’t go their way, it might just matter a whole lot more.

“It’s 1-1,’’ Marchand said. “We’re in the middle of the playoffs. You’re not going to walk through teams. We have home ice advantage now and we go home.’’

We have home ice advantage.

So sure, there is disappointment in the wake of missed opportunity, regret for a night they got pushed around, knocked down and outskated for the majority of two-plus periods, but the reality after the two-game swing through Tampa? The Bruins did what they came to do, leaving town with a split, tilting the home-ice advantage their way, taking a game from the conference’s top-seeded team in their own building, putting the pressure squarely on Tampa to do the same in Boston. After Saturday afternoon’s lopsided 6-2 win (a game even Lightning coach Jon Cooper admitted should have been 7-2 but for a bad disallowed goal call), was there ever any doubt the Lightning would be blasting from the word go?

Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy preached that message hard and loud. And still the Bruins were on their heels for a good 10 minutes to open the game, alive on the scorecard thanks only to a majestic series of Tuukka Rask saves, scrambling and skating just to avoid falling into too deep a hole to escape.

“They’re a good team. They lost, 6-2, at home. They didn’t feel good about their game. So you’ve got to expect they’re going to go out and play hard,’’ Cassidy said. “We can discuss it all we want before the game. The players had to live it and they did for the first 10 minutes. We were fortunate we weren’t out of it because we could have been with all the chances they generated. We expected that. They’re a very good team and we expect it in Game 3 moving forward.’’

Still, there has to be something comforting about returning home with that safety net in hand, the one that says win all your games here, and Pittsburgh or Washington awaits. And safety on one side means there is some uncertainty on the other. Plant a seed of doubt and you never know what advantage might sprout.

“This series is going to be tight. I think everybody forecasted that,’’ said defenseman Charlie McAvoy, who tied the game at 1-1 with a first-period blast. “We knew in this room we were going to get a great effort out of them tonight. You can’t kid yourself about that. They come out hard, we maybe didn’t play our best game, didn’t get enough shot opportunities, whatever you want to say. But at the end of the day we’re 1-1 heading back to Boston.’’

“We’re going to go home to our fans, in a building where we’re a confident bunch. We’re excited.’’

That these two great teams are battling head to head in Round 2 of the playoffs flies in the face of logic, at least in this corner. Any format that has the Eastern Conference’s second and third seeds meeting in the first round (the Maple Leafs were third) and the winner advancing to face the top overall seed seems unfairly punitive for finishing high. Still, if the Bruins, who finished 1 measly point behind Tampa in the final standings, do somehow stay on this road all the way to Lord Stanley’s Cup, they sure will have earned it the hard way.

“I’ve heard some upheaval about the format and the same sort of things going on in the West with Winnipeg and Nashville, the two top point getters during the regular season finding themselves in a matchup in the second round where one of those teams is going home,’’ forward David Backes said.

“You know what? To win a Stanley Cup you’ve got to beat the best teams and Tampa is one of the best teams. As much as you want to change that, as much as you may want to talk about 1 through 16 for the whole league, travel, building rivalries, whatever it is, when it’s your season on the line, your win or go home against an opponent, it doesn’t matter. The intensity is going to be high.’’

That it was, particularly on Monday night, when multiple fisticuffs broke out throughout the game, and a total of 13 penalties for a combined 26 minutes were called. They ultimately proved too much for the visiting team to overcome, especially after Marchand went unrewarded for a slash to his hands courtesy of Anton Stralman inside the three-minute mark, a no-call that almost immediately followed Torey Krug’s goal that had cut the deficit to 3-2. That proved to be Boston’s last stand, and Brayden Point’s empty netter made it final.

And yet the visitors get to go home now with a game in hand. That’s not bad.

“Yeah, a hundred percent,’’ Pastrnak said. “We got one win but you know how it is in life, you got something that you want, you get it and then you want more right? We wanted to leave here 2-0, it didn’t happen, so we got to think about Wednesday now.’’

Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @Globe_Tara.