NHL

Hockey night in Manhattan

The Rangers practice for the first time at the refurbished Garden yesterday in preparation for tonight’s home opener vs. the Leafs. (Anthony J. Causi)

There was this grand and famous marquee outside the old Garden, the really old Garden where Red Berenson hit the post, between 49th and 50th on Eighth.

And if everything old were new again, there’d be the same landmark outside the remodeled Garden between 31st and 33d on Seventh, the one where Stephane Matteau! Matteau! Matteau! scored, and after nearly three weeks of the 2011-12 season and after more than six months without a game in Manhattan, this is what would be up in lights:

TONITE HOCKEY

RANGERS V/S TORONTO

The Broadway Blueshirts, who technically never have played on Broadway no matter the Garden’s location, raise the curtain on their newfangled building tonight.

And after a training camp during which they went miles and miles across the ocean, and after seven regular-season games on the road in three countries and on two continents, the Rangers finally get to click their skates together and say in unison, “There’s no place like home.”

This house is the Blueshirts’ exclusively for now. The Knicks are locked out. The stage belongs to hockey. The spotlight is on the Rangers.

For once, “it’s only hockey,” happens to be correct.

There have been a lot of big teams in New York. No team has been bigger than the 1994 Stanley Cup champion Rangers. No championship victory is more famous or regarded as more historic. No championship has ever meant more to its sport than the Rangers’ one and only title since 1940 meant to hockey and to the NHL.

Yes, that was then, when Mark Messier was on the ice, and not now, when he is the front office. But this is the time for these Rangers to seize the moment 17 seasons later, and this is the time for their signature athlete, Henrik Lundqvist, to take Manhattan the way he had Stockholm at hello.

This is the time for Brad Richards, a Ranger since July 1 who tonight gets to wear the Blueshirt on Broadway for the very first time, to introduce himself to the fans who are ready to embrace him with open arms if he can just get the puck to Marian Gaborik, if he can just get the power play to sing.

Home can’t just be where the heart is for the Rangers, home has to be where they dominate. Over the last two seasons, the Rangers won 38 and lost 44 at this address and that’s primarily why the team was forced to go to the last day of each of the last two years fighting for the conference’s final playoff spot, once successful, once not.

It’s great that they’re transforming the building but any fan would agree that it would be even better for the Rangers to transform their record at the Garden.

But even as the Blueshirts get set to unwrap something shiny and new, there’s an unknown here, and no, this isn’t a reference to how much, exactly, the team and/or the fans might miss Sean Avery, exiled off, off, off Broadway.

Because it’s impossible to know just what the atmosphere will be at the new digs, impossible to know whether the high, higher and highest prices throughout the lower tier will mean that the Garden will now be host to an audience and not a crowd.

It is impossible to know whether this remodeled building will lose its soul the way Yankee Stadium did when it moved across the street; impossible to know whether the chant of “Let’s Go Rangers!” will be as loud and as impassioned now as it once was.

We will find that out. We do, however, know this:

For the first time at this new place, for the first time this season, for the first time in six months in Manhattan:

Tonight, hockey.

larry.brooks@nypost.com