PITTSBURGH — After 12 days on the road, five games, two periods — and with one weary foot already on the plane home — the Vancouver Canucks finally collapsed.

Their loss Saturday at the end of a six-game marathon through the chilly American Northeast was as predictable as the route to the 5-4 final score against the Pittsburgh Penguins was riotously unconventional.

It can be fairly argued that it wasn’t exhaustion that ultimately doomed the Canucks but bad luck and bad plays, as Vancouver looked the more energetic team for most of the contest before allowing four straight third-period goals to give away a game it led 3-1 with 13 minutes remaining.

But the Canucks always find a way to lose these games at the end of long trips. Excluding a 2-1 win Dec. 22 in Tampa, where Vancouver was outshot 27-19 and somehow survived a 10-1 disparity in power plays, the Canucks are 1-8-1 the last two years in the final games of road trips of four games or longer.

Now, this is the National Hockey League; you can’t dodge four- and five-game trips. But you shouldn’t be volunteering to play six- and seven-game odysseys like the Canucks did this season. And, for goodness sakes, if you do undertake these epic treks, don’t stack three of them in the span of 2½ months.

Unless the Winter Olympics return to Vancouver or Rogers Arena burns to the ground, the Canucks should never have a schedule like this again.

When the hockey operations department, led by president Trevor Linden and general manager Jim Benning, met in New York last week with NHL officials to discuss next year’s schedule, one priority was to shorten their longest trips in 2016-17.

For this regular season, which lasts six months, the Canucks crammed 23 of their 41 road games into 78 days. They also played 13 home games during that time, and will have travelled before 25 of 37 games when they face off Tuesday against the Nashville Predators in Vancouver.

Even veteran Canuck players like 35-year-olds Ryan Miller and the Sedins, Daniel and Henrik, haven’t seen a schedule like this.

“Personally, this is one of the hardest starts to a season I’ve ever experienced as far as travel,” Miller said Saturday after giving up four goals on 29 shots. “You can take the road mindset where you’re just completely engulfed in hockey and kind of roll with it. But at the same time, you’re logging a lot of miles, sitting around hotels, trying to find practice time. It’s probably not ideal.

“My biggest surprise is I don’t feel we’ve had the homestands to match our road trips. I’ve never seen anything like that. We have a building we basically control. There’s no reason for that.”

Danny Sedin agreed that six-game trips should be avoided whenever possible, then added: “We should be real happy we’re still in the hunt here. It’s so easy when you start losing on the road to keep losing. When you get home, at least you get a fresh start kind of. We battled hard on the road and we should be proud of that. Now we’ve got to take care of home ice.”

Eleven of the Canucks next 14 games are at home, and their longest road trip the rest of the season is three games. They’re done with the Eastern time zone.