Chalk it up to being one of those days at the office.

Everyone’s acutely familiar with them.

Car didn’t start getting out of the garage. Boss on a gasket-blowing rampage. Elevator stalled between floors, making you late for that can’t-miss meeting.

Laptop fried. Spilled coffee on the new duds.

“Pretty much,’’ agreed Alex Singleton, “everything went wrong.”

Yes, one of those days.

The pain of the 30-7 streak-busting loss to the Saskatchewan Roughriders now a few hours behind them when Saturday morning arrived, the sun rose, the sky was a bright, deep blue and the Calgary Stampeders were still in first place, still the team any of the other eight would change places with in a heartbeat.

The day would get even better later with the Toronto Argonauts holding off Winnipeg to clinch first in the West for the Stamps.

So, hey, surely life’s not that bad, is it?

Photo by Mark Shannon

“The biggest thing you learn,’’ said quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell, “is that it’s never as good as you think or never as bad as you think when you see film.

“First-half-wise, we felt were doing the things we wanted to do. Maybe just missing on a couple of things that, when you make them, it’s a great game and, when you don’t, it’s a bad game.

“Just a little bit off right now.

“That’s something we want to clean up going into playoffs. We want to be hot. We want to be on. We want to have those staple plays that when we call ’em, we’re 100 per cent on ’em.

“That’s everybody. That’s me. The O-line. The receivers.

“As a team, I think we all understand we’re not as great as we want to be. We are a good team. But we can get a lot better.”

Friday, the Stamps, winners of 11 on the trot and unbeaten in 17 straight inside the cozy confines of McMahon Stadium, seemed to be stuck in a quicksand of their own concoction. Strange mental miscues. A torrent of penalties. Poor cohesion. Uncharacteristic turnovers.

Seemed the harder they struggled, the deeper they sank.

“Wasn’t a good game for our group,’’ reiterated head coach Dave Dickenson on rundown morning. “Hard to take a lot of good from it. The thing that bothered me most was we lost our poise and we couldn’t regroup as a team and reload.

“Certainly not a game you want to watch a lot.”

When asked if he felt the play of his MOP quarterback could best be described as a trifle ‘off’ at the moment, Dickenson shrugged.

“I’d say the offence is ‘off.’ And the quarterback is part of that. But I’m not seeing good movement up front, not seeing our receivers making plays.

“Just a little bit ‘off.’ We had a lot of fingertips, off the tips of the hands. We were loose in our ball security, as well.

“It snowballed. Once we made a mistake or two, guys questioned where they were going, mental errors as well. And, ultimately, (Saskatchewan) played well.”

Photo by Mark Shannon

The good news, as painful as the experience seems at the moment, is that there remains ample time to regain whatever equilibrium might’ve been lost Friday.

“That’s the thing,’’ agreed Mitchell. “The last couple  of years, it’s actually been the last game of the season, ’14 and last year (when they’ve played poorly). Then you have those questions going into playoffs.

“You’re never glad to lose and it doesn’t happen a lot to us. But this at least gives us the time to step up and to change it.”

With the express aim being through their closing two fixtures – at Edmonton next weekend and then home to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers – being:  No more days that qualify as one of those days.

“Even when it is one of those days, you still want to find a way to fight through it and come out with a win,’’ said Singleton.

“And we have before, a lot of the time. That’s the thing. It didn’t happen this time and we’ve got to move on from that.

“We’ve got two games left. We’re going to play one of these teams – possibly both of them depending on how the playoffs line up – again before we’re done.

“So we’ve got the chance these last two weeks to make statements, to show them the team we know we are.

“Not the team we were last night.”