While Fax were going down 34-28 in the north east, title rivals Barrow were finishing on the wrong end of a 46-16 whacking at Batley, leaving Matt Calland's team a point clear with a game in hand on the Cumbrians.
It was a surprisingly positive end to a potentially catastrophic afternoon, with Fax trailing by a scarcely believable 32-0 at the break before a second half revival secured the crucial bonus point and saw them fall just short of victory.
"I'd have settled for that outcome at half time," admitted Calland, who was without Australian half back Ben Black, who has been confirmed as having ligament damage in his hand.
"You always want to win, but realistically you can't expect to do that after being 32-0 behind.
"Results elsewhere probably went our way, and there are going to be a lot of twists and turns before the end of the season, but all we can concentrate on is what we do.
"We certainly need to start building some form towards the play offs because what we produced for a lot of yesterday's game wasn't acceptable."
Calland was particularly scathing of his side's first half display, which allowed an Australian-dominated Thunder line up to run riot.
"Appalling, disgraceful, whatever word you want to put on it," said Calland, who admitted Gateshead's latest influx of antipodeans, former Melbourne half back Russell Aitken and the ex-Cronulla trio of Nick Youngquest, Kris Kahler and Paul Franze, had made a significant impact.
"Gateshead were very good, they controlled the ball and they've got some very good players.
"When you have the luxury of adding four players who have played as much NRL as they have, they're going to improve you.
"We don't have that because we're not Gateshead, we can't just go and sign players like that.
"They are a quality team, we knew that and we did plenty of work on them this week, but they out smarted us, out muscled us, out enthused us.
"At that point, I felt sorry for the fans who travelled all that way.
"The players got a bit of a roasting at half time and scored a few points but we just ran out of time."