Just when it appeared that there couldn’t ever be anything more humiliating than yesterday’s Rangers’ first-period effort, Nick, on the scoreboard screen, asked Melissa to marry him. She stared in disbelief, then got up and left with Nick in far faster pursuit than any member of the home team had been to the puck.
Yes, Melissa walked out, like Osi Umenyiora out of a Bill Sheridan meeting, like Latrell Sprewell out of a required Jimmy Dolan media training session, leaving the crowd in a far greater buzz than anything created by the Rangers practically this season.
“I thought maybe it was staged because of Valentine’s Day,” Rangers center Erik Christensen said. “Was that real?”
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Certainly it was more real than the Rangers’ postseason chances would have been if they didn’t score a 5-2 victory over a thin and tired (third game in four days) Tampa Bay team, who is now tied with the Blueshirts in the standings with 63 points.
The overconfident Nick violated the cardinal rule of pinching down the boards: If you are going to go, you had better be sure you can get there.
“My girlfriend said if I ever did something like that she wouldn’t be happy,” said Christensen, who confessed he wouldn’t be the type anyway.
Though Christensen doesn’t have a scoreboard-proposing personality, the Rangers are looking to infuse the 26-year-old with a little more confidence.
“Management has been working on me between the ears,” he said. “[General manager] Glen Sather likes confident people. The first thing he said to me when I came here was he wanted me to get an ego and that’s been a stretch for me.”
So are expectations of rallies from early two-goal deficits by this red-light-challenged team. But this time the Rangers took energy either from Melissa’s refusal to be intimidated by her situation or from some quality period-break time with coach John Tortorella, who, ask Michael Del Zotto, is not the kind of person with whom you would want to pick out furniture.
They also were jump-started by Sean Avery, who almost went sideboards-to-sideboards to beat Mike Smith with a remarkable penalty shot to cut the deficit to 2-1, and the Rangers simply began scoring. That was where Christensen, the team’s top line center-by-necessity, came in.
Christensen — not exactly Peter Forsberg during failed NHL stops in Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Anaheim — remarkably held off the 6-foot-6 Victor Hedman while circling the net to feed Vinny Prospal, who tied the game, 2-2, starting a one-man feeding frenzy.
“Ask any player,” said Christensen. “Even when I got that assist on the first goal, your adrenaline goes up and you want more and more.
“It’s like a drug. You crave more.”
When Smith opened up the five-hole, Christensen hit the only spot available from a deep angle to give the Rangers a 3-2 advantage. He then tallied an unassisted goal after blocking an Andrej Meszaros shot and beautifully nailed the top corner to give the Rangers a 4-2 lead and a victory.
“Only one other guy on our team could have made that shot,” Tortorella said. And with that guy, Marian Gaborik, still out of the lineup with a skate cut, Christensen almost needed to make it, too.
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Christensen’s three points yesterday took him only to 13 in the 38 games since being cleaned up out of the garbage dump, but Tortorella, who buried Christensen through a December when the Rangers struggled to score, too, is seeing a more consistent effort.
“He has said it: ‘This is his last whack at playing in the National Hockey League,’ ” Tortorella said. “He’s getting a great opportunity with some pretty good people around him.”
Unfortunately there aren’t enough of such people on this team to create a second scoring line. Putting it another way, there aren’t as many fish in this sea as Melissa, apparently blindsided yesterday like Blair Betts by Donald Brashear, seemed confident are in hers.
So somebody had to score to keep the Rangers’ postseason hopes reasonably alive into the Olympic break. And though Nick didn’t score, Christensen surely did.