WASHINGTON — You want to know what momentum looks like? It looks like a black rubber blur traveling at about 476 miles an hour, a missile with bad intentions launched about 40 feet away from you and whizzing by so quickly you can sense it more than you can see it.
“A good shot,” Henrik Lundquvist said of Mike Green’s power-play slap shot with 5 minutes and 48 seconds left in regulation time yesterday, the game winner in a 3-2 Capitals victory that sends these best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinals back to New York tied at two games apiece. “He beat me.”
So, yes, that’s what momentum looks like, or what it looked like just before 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon. A little earlier than that, it looked like Marian Gaborik’s equalizing goal just before the end of the second period, his second in two games after a two-week scoring slump.
And much earlier than that, it certainly looked like the chariot carrying the Rangers directly from Game 3 in the wee hours of Wednesday night and the early minutes of Thursday morning. That 2-1 triple-overtime epic was supposed to be the ultimate burst of momentum, right? Almost everybody watching that classic had the same reaction as the game ground on, whether it was on Twitter or in a saloon or in your man cave or in your car, listening on the radio:
Man, whoever loses this, it’s gonna be hard to overcome.
Man, whoever wins this is gonna have ALL the momentum.
The hard truth, of course, is that momentum often has a mind, and imagination, of its own. When Jerry West hit that half-court shot to tie Game 3 of the 1970 Finals at the Fabulous Forum, the Knicks wound up winning in overtime. When Endy Chavez brought the ball back from the other side of the Shea Stadium fence, the Cardinals won the pennant a couple of innings later. The Nets blew a 21-point lead to the Celtics in Game 3 of the ’02 East finals, the Celtics immediately lost three straight.
All those teams had momentum. How’d that go for them?
Rangers coach John Tortorella had a thing to say about momentum yesterday, which was interesting since his postgame observations consisted of exactly 11 words. Ten of them were these: “Their power play. They gained momentum from their power play.”
Hard to argue. Twenty-seven seconds after Carl Hagelin was sent off for slashing, Green uncorked his game-winner, and the Verizon Center went into full Mardi Gras mode, and stayed that way until the final horn.
Now, undoubtedly, the Capitals will be the team carrying momentum into Game 5 tomorrow night at Madison Square Garden, and you can forgive the Rangers if they’re inclined to tell the Caps: “You want it? You got it. It’s yours.”
After all, what’s easy to forget in the immediate aftermath of this game is that the Rangers did precisely what they needed to do across this two-game sojourn to the District. The Caps had stolen home ice with their win in Game 2, and the Rangers came south and took it right back.
“Now it’s a best-of-three and we get the two home games,” Brad Richards said. “We have home ice again. That’s not a bad place to be.”
Would it have been nice for the Rangers to open up a two-game cushion for the first time in these playoffs? Sure. Would you feel better about the work to come if it didn’t feel as if every goal was the result of a perfect hockey storm? Of course.
But every now and again it’s good to take a look at the carnage left in the wake of this 2012 playoff season, the carcasses of so many high seeds littered along the side of the street like so much highway road kill. Who’s in better shape, the Rangers or the Canucks? The Rangers or the Red Wings? The Rangers or the Penguins?
Best of three. They have home ice again. Forget who has the momentum. That’s not a bad place to be.