DETROIT -- As soon as the ball left Alex Avila's bat, Shawn Kelley dropped his head and began walking to the dugout, like a beaten racehorse heading back to the barn. He was hoping for the best but expecting the worst, and before he had crossed the third-base line the Comerica Park crowd told him that he and the Yankees had gotten the latter.

Avila's ball sailed over Ichiro Suzuki's head and hit the base of the right-field fence, scoring pinch-runner Bryan Holaday from second with the run that gave the Tigers a 3-2 walk-off win, and sent the Yankees just a little deeper into the hole that it is getting harder and harder for them to climb out of.

"That's about as bad as I've felt walking off a mound in my career," said Kelley, who had taken to wearing a horse's head mask in the outfield while shagging flies as a good luck charm during the Yankees' recent five-game winning streak. "I didn't even watch. I just put my head down and walked off the field. It would've been a nice surprise if he would've [made the catch], but I assumed it was a homer."

And with that, the Yankees leave Detroit having lost their final opportunity to make up ground on the Tigers, whom they trail in the race for the second AL wild-card berth, in head-to-head action. They head from here to Toronto -- to face a team in even worse shape than they -- but again, there is virtually no more margin for error. They need to win that series against the Blue Jays, and preferably sweep it, if they are to keep a spark of life in the flickering embers of their playoff hopes.

"It's not what we wanted," Joe Girardi said. "But we've got to turn the page and go and put up a win tomorrow. You've got to take it day by day. It's definitely not what we wanted, but our guys played hard, played extremely hard this series, and we've got to go continue on to Toronto."

Every game, whether given away or just plain lost -- as was this one -- is becoming vital. And before long, there will be nothing to look forward to but the opening of spring training 2015.

"We need to have the approach that we need to win every day," Derek Jeter said. "Today it didn’t happen. But like I always tell you guys, if we win our games we'll be fine. It's in our own hands. We just need to win."

Thursday's loss, in a game that had playoff-like intensity, was one more step toward the fate of this season being taken out of the Yankees' hands. Now they sit three games behind the Tigers and the idle Seattle Mariners in the wild-card race with 30 games left to play. And after the Baltimore Orioles beat the Tampa Bay Rays 5-4, the Yankees find themselves seven games back of in the AL East race, with eight more games left to play against them.

That's how thin a sliver of hope the Yankees have left themselves, and why losing a game like this one is so damaging.

The questions lingering in the air afterward were many:

Why was an offense that was able to string nine straight hits together to score eight runs off David Price on Wednesday only able to manage four hits and two runs off Kyle Lobstein, who was making his first major-league start?

Why wasn't Nick Castellanos called out via fan interference when a man reached over the sidewall in right to catch a foul ball that maybe -- but not likely -- could have been caught by Zelous Wheeler?

Why did Hiroki Kuroda's command, impeccable for six of the seven innings he worked, desert him just long enough in the fifth inning to allow the Tigers to tie the game? Why was Kelley pitching in that spot, and not Dellin Betances -- who had worked a strong eighth -- or even David Robertson, despite it being a non-save situation?

Why did Brian McCann's drive to right with two men on base have to hook foul at the last moment, depriving the Yankees of a potential three-run homer in the top of the ninth?

And why did Ichiro leap headlong into the wall chasing Avila's game-winning drive, only to have the ball land at his feet and five feet to his right?

Why, why, why?

There are plausible answers to some of them: Girardi made the point that the Yankees actually hit the ball harder off Lobstein than they had against Price, but without similar luck; Girardi had used Betances Wednesday night with an 8-3 lead, precluding him from going two innings today; there was wind blowing from left to right that may have carried McCann's ball the five feet that changed it from a potential game-winner to just another strike; and to just about everyone's eyes, Avila's shot looked like a home run leaving the bat anyway.

But the real answer is that none of it matters anymore. As they have all season, the Yankees had chances to win this game, or at least score more than two runs, and did not. They got an unearned run in the third on a throwing error by Castellanos and an RBI single by Jacoby Ellsbury, but instead of keeping the line moving, as he had Wednesday night, Jeter bounced out to end the inning. And in the fourth, despite having runners on second and third with one out, the Yankees could only manage one run on McCann's groundout.

After that the next 15 Yankees were retired, by Lobstein, who went six innings, by Blaine Hardy and by Joba Chamberlain, who went an inning but left after walking Carlos Beltran. Phil Coke then barely survived McCann's foul ball but recovered to blow two fastballs by him to end the inning with runners on first and third.

So yeah, while it might appear that the Yankees have been playing better of late, as Jeter contends (they have won six of their last eight) the same old problems keep popping up, again and again.

Once again Kuroda pitched well enough to win -- seven innings, four hits, two runs -- but came away with his 10th no-decision of the season. Once again the Yankee lineup failed to come up with the timely hit. And as has been the case more and more often lately, a reliever who had previously been reliable wound up failing.

And once again, the Yankees are left with nothing but promises that somehow, things will get better tomorrow.

Jeter, to his credit, continues to maintain that the Yankees' real goal is not the second wild card, but the division title.

"That's always the goal, until something else happens and you have to alter your goals," he said. "I don’t ever think you set your sights on something less than you can accomplish, so our goal is to win games. We need to win tomorrow."

The problem is, they are quickly running out of tomorrows, and today's game only reminded you of that.