Maybe what’s happening in Washington is a balancing of the sporting universe. If this month indeed marks the end of Alexander Ovechkin’s legendary Capitals career, something will have to fill the void of the “Great 8.” And if the baseball gods have a perverse sense of humor, perhaps the Nationals are offering their own punny candidate.

At Nationals Park this past week, the eighth inning has not been great for Washington’s beleaguered bullpen. Quite the opposite, actually. On Tuesday night, en route to a 7-6 extra-innings loss to the Cardinals, the Nationals blew an eighth-inning lead for the third straight game. It was their sixth defeat in seven games; only a rally in the bottom of the eighth inning Monday night against St. Louis kept them from Major League Baseball’s longest losing streak.

A pair of 10th-inning doubles from left fielder Thomas Saggese and second baseman JJ Wetherholt gave the Cardinals their first lead since the top of the third inning. The Nationals could not match them; their only run in the final four innings came on a wild pitch in the 10th.

The culprit Tuesday night, however, was a familiar one. Washington entered the game with an 8.10 ERA in the eighth inning, baseball’s third-worst mark. Their relievers’ overall ERA: 6.34, fourth worst. After Nathan Church’s two-out, two-run homer off Nationals reliever Gus Varland tied the game at 5, an announced crowd of 20,036 offered mostly groans. Now the Nationals (4-7) will head to Wednesday’s rubber match against the Cardinals (6-5) with their biggest weakness under even greater scrutiny.

Right fielder James Wood and first baseman Curtis Mead homered in the third and fifth inning, respectively, to put the Nationals ahead 3-2 in the fifth inning. Shortstop CJ Abrams and Mead soon added to the advantage, which grew to 5-2 in the sixth.

But then things fell apart, as they tend to do for the Nationals’ bullpen. Cade Cavalli, the Nationals’ opening day starter, had departed midway through the fifth inning after a 94-pitch outing in which he struggled with his command but held the Cardinals to just two runs, one of them earned.

Paxton Schultz gave the Nationals a clean inning in relief of Cavalli. PJ Poulin followed and allowed one run in a dicey 1 1/3 innings. But Church tagged Varland’s 87-mph slider in the eighth, and neither team could find another run before extra innings.