ST. LOUIS - Someone had scribbled "10:15 bus" with a magic marker on a board in the Devils' dressing room, and it was getting close to that time Tuesday night when left wing Ryane Clowe emerged from a trainer's room after getting stitch work on his bloodied right index finger.

Most of his teammates already had showered, dressed in a traveling suit and were gone.

Clowe had done none of that, but after walking the walk in a 3-0 Devils loss to the St. Louis Blues, the big left wing squeezed in 90 seconds to talk the talk.

“You know, this is it for us right now,” Clowe said. “You can idle along for 25 games, then you’re going to find yourself out of it. You've gotta take charge.”

Clowe did at the tail end of a lost night by picking a fight with Blues defenseman Roman Polak while St. Louis was celebrating Max Lapierre’s empty-net goal at 17:52 of the third.

After that, Devils fourth-line right wing Steve Bernier got him into a little shoving match with Chris Stewart, and both wound up with roughing minors and 10-minute misconducts at 19:10.

“What Ryane Clowe did was very good for our team,” Bernier said. “You just tried to follow the leader.”

Clowe has been a leader since returning late last month from a concussion that cost him 32 games. He’s also been on one of the top point producers on a team that now has been shut out six times, with three goals and nine assists in 16 games since his return, which included a second-game-back fight on Dec. 28 against the Isles' Mark Carkner.

And now, he's earning some of that big $24.25 million, five-year contract the Devils gave him last summer with post-game comments that all his teammates all need to read and digest.

“We just gotta step up and play well,” he said. “Maybe it’s five or six guys who have been through it before and have some experiences. You gotta grab the reins here and take charge on this. We can’t just wait around."

That's good advice for everyone from captain Bryce Salvador on down to rookie blueliner Eric Gelinas.

The Devils played well for a stretch, but now two consecutive losses have cost them four points that could have pulled to the top of that big group of teams they’d been in all season for the final playoff spots in the Eastern Conference.

There’s no shame in losing on the road to the Blues, a Western Conference power, and the Devils played them tough trailing just 1-0 until almost halfway through the third. But as head coach Pete DeBoer mentioned in his post-game talk, “there’s not many silver linings this time of the year.”

That’s why Clowe felt the need to fight.

“We gotta go take those games,” he said. “Third period, we're down a goal. You gotta make a strong push. I just think we gotta get a little more bite in our game overall … a little more urgency, desperation.”