The Bruins are making the most of Tuukka Time.

Boston’s young goaltender Tuukka Rask started his fourth straight game for the Bruins, and he has helped the team record a point in all four. Tuesday night, the Bruins defeated the Sabres 3-2 in a sudden-death shootout at HSBC Arena in Buffalo. (Click here for the complete recap.)

Rask has been instrumental in Boston turning a 10-game losing streak into a four-game point streak, including two consecutive wins. He came up big against the Sabres on Tuesday in one of the biggest wins of the season, while recording a career-high 43 saves to halt the Sabres and hand Buffalo its fifth loss in a row.

For the second straight game, it was Rask who kept the Bruins afloat after a strong first period followed by a lackluster second. In Montreal on Sunday the Bruins staked Rask to a two-goal lead before watching the Canadiens come hard at Boston with a 15-3 shot advantage in the second. Rask stoned the Habs and preserved the shutout.

It was not quite the same on Tuesday. Daniel Paille scored two first-period goals, but the Sabres came back with two of their own to tie it in the second. The shot discrepancy was not as large (14-11, Buffalo) but the Bruins turned over a plethora of pucks in the neutral zone and the Sabres turned the sloppy play into scores by Derek Roy and Tyler Myers to tie it and eventually send it to the shootout.

Rask let in a first-round goal by Jason Pominville before stopping Jochen Hect, Tim Connolly and Drew Stafford. David Krejci won it for the Bruins in the fourth round.

Rask has been big in carrying the Bruins and giving incumbent starter Tim Thomas some time off that could help him regain his Vezina Trophy form from last year. If Boston can get both of them going at the same time, it could climb out of the playoff cellar and be a dangerous team come springtime.

Here are three things we learned in Tuesday’s shootout victory:

PAILLE EARNS HIS KEEP

The Bruins did not acquire Paille on Oct. 20 from Buffalo for him to skate on the first line with playmaker Marc Savard. Paille was brought in to be a third- or fourth-line checking forward who could use his speed to help kill penalties. In that role, he has been effective. The Bruins had the second-ranked penalty kill in the league coming into Tuesday’s action at 86.7 percent (oddly enough, right behind Buffalo at 86.8 percent). Some offense was expected from Paille but, for the most part, goals are just be icing on the cake.

“He played well. I talked to him this morning,” coach Claude Julien said to reporters. “Last time we were in this building, he seemed nervous and didn’t have a great game. But tonight, he went out there and did what he does best, which is forecheck and then be on top of the puck all the time. He had some big goals for us and actually almost had a third one there in the first period. I thought he played really well for us.”

If Paille was nervous playing his second game against the team that drafted him (20th overall in 2002) he did not show it on Tuesday. His first goal came courtesy of a wrap-around on Sabres goaltender Ryan Miller at 4:51 in the first period and he added the second on a tip in front of the net off a blast from captain Zdeno Chara at 11:58.

In the last two games, Paille has skated on the first line with Savard and Miroslav Satan as forward Milan Lucic has moved to skate predominantly on the fourth line with Shawn Thornton and Steve Begin. It may seem like an odd move since the Bruins envision Savard and Lucic as a prominent goal-scoring tandem, but the fact of the matter is that Lucic just does not have his timing back from his ankle injury and may not actually have the skill set to score buckets of goals the way Cam Neely did back in the day.

Paille is not going to be a long-term answer for the Bruins scoring woes. Savard will eventually need a sniper to be his partner in crime, but Paille’s two goals on Tuesday and strong play on the puck early in the game were exactly what Boston needed.

SHOOTOUT WOES COME TO AN END

Boston has had a tough time in the shootout of late. All of those losses cannot be attributed directly to the skaters who have been unable to beat opposing goaltenders. Granted, it helps when your teammates can score at all (the Bruins had missed their last six straight shootout shots) but the 10-game losing streak would not have been such a historic event if the goaltenders could have stolen one or two wins in the process.

Considering how bad the Bruins had been in the format there must have been a sinking feeling when Pominville put the first one by Rask to open the frame. But, Marco Sturm immediately tied it at one and Rask did the rest before Krejci beat Miller in the sudden-death round.

Krejci is not a great shootout skater (he is now 4-for-15 with two game-deciding goals in his career) but Julien had confidence enough in his second line center to be the one to break the shootout loss streak.

“I had a pretty good feeling when he went out there,” Julien said to reporters. “He had some pretty tough shifts and somewhere along the way you want to redeem yourself and he did a great job in scoring that goal.”

B'S ADJUST THE DEFENSE

Andrew Ference did not think he was going to play this week and said last Friday that he thought a return was doubtful before the Olympic break. That was before Johnny Boychuk took a puck to the face against Vancouver on Saturday and broke his orbital bone, an injury that will sideline him until early March at the earliest. Compound Boychuk’s absence with Mark Stuart being lost last Tuesday with a broken finger against the Capitals, and the middle of the Bruins defense essentially has been gutted in the last seven days.

Adam McQuaid, who joked a few weeks ago that he keeps an extra couple of gallons of gas in his car because of his constant trips back and forth between Boston and Providence, has skated the last two games to mixed results. He had his feel-good story of the season on Sunday when he scored the Bruins' (and his first NHL) goal against the Canadiens. Against the Sabres, though, he was the man to blame for Buffalo’s game-tying goal in the second period.

The Bruins had just had a great scoring chance late in the period with forward Mark Recchi just missing a slow puck open in Miller’s crease. The Sabres cleared off the boards by the red line and McQuaid stepped up to control the puck. The problem? He didn’t.

The puck just floated off his stick onto that of fellow rookie and rising star Tyler Myers who beat Rask with a surprise wrist shot from the blue line. Ference was near enough Myers that the defenseman shot around Ference at such an angle that Rask did not see it clean off the stick.

It was an example of a pair of defensemen that, for one reason or another, have not seen action of late and it cost the Bruins the lead. It also makes the depth on the blue line a little weak. In a perfect world Matt Hunwick would be the Bruins sixth defender, not skating on the second pair with Dennis Wideman. Until Boychuk and Stuart (two of the bigger bodies in the corps as well) come back and Ference is at full strength the Bruins are just going to have to make due and rely on Chara, Rask and Tim Thomas to keep pucks out of the net.