"I'm not worried about yesterday, that's for sure," said Matthew Tkachuk after his team's practice on Wednesday morning. "I don't think anybody else is. It's a long season, it's one game. When you look at it, maybe we deserved to win that one and I'm sure there's some games this year that we deserved to lose that we won.
"It's obviously not what we wanted but we're moving on."
Holding a 2-1 lead in the final two minutes of the third period, The Flames looked to be on their way to a win in their first matchup with the expansion Golden Knights.
But Vegas scored two goals in 10 seconds before adding an empty-netter to edge out a victory.
"Any time you have adversity there's an opportunity for growth," said head coach Glen Gulutzan. "That's a tough one yesterday for everybody. But in anything, anything we do, you can't control what happens all the time but you can control how you react to it. You're in charge of that, and we're reacting the way we think we should react today."
Following a high-tempo practice, the players and coaches held a meeting to discuss the team's final 32 games of the regular season.
"[It was] positive - it's just a way for us to grow as a team," said Troy Brouwer of the meeting. "We just talked about mindset going forward, making sure that we know ways to win and give ourselves better opportunities to win going forward.
"The worst thing you can do is be down on each other. Today we came in, lifted each other up, had some good, positive meetings and now we're going to forget about last night."
The loss was the fifth in as many outings for the Flames, but marked the first time since Dec. 29 that they did not earn at least a single point.
In 11 January contests, the Flames earned 16 of a possible 22 points. Although they were not in a playoff spot as of Wednesday morning, only one point separates the Flames from San Jose and Los Angeles, who are second and third in the Pacific Division, respectively.
"This isn't a league that you can mourn for too long - we have to go," said Gulutzan. "Where we go from here, no one can predict. If we could, we'd set up these types of situations all the time, but you can't."
The Flames don't have to wait long for a chance to get back in the win column, with their next game coming Thursday night when they host the league-leading Tampa Bay Lightning. The last time these two teams clashed back on Jan. 11, the visiting Flames emerged with a 5-1 victory.
"We had a good game last time we played Tampa," said Travis Hamonic. "We know they're going to come at us hard and with all their skill. We've been playing some good hockey as of late and it was a tough circumstance [last night] but that doesn't take away from how well we played for fifty-eight-and-a-half minutes."
"That's how the game works sometimes and I'm sure we'll be on the other side of some of those games as well."
