WASHINGTON – Hockey fans don’t need much in the way of reference points; surnames will do just fine. There isn’t a Rangers fan who was alive on the evening of May 27, 1994, who needs anything other than the word “Matteau” to summon time, place, who they were with, what they were drinking, what they were screaming.
Go back a few years. If you’re old enough to remember the night of April 29, 1971, then all you need is the word “Stemkowski,” and you know: where, when, with who. Forty-one years later there are still Rangers fans who can recite, as if it were part of the Baltimore Catechism, the details of that goal, 1:29 into the third overtime, salvaging Game 6 against the Chicago Black Hawks.
Now, onto that shelf, we place Marian Gaborik.
Now, into the Rangers’ pantheon of forever moments, we add another architect, we add another moment, we add this goal at 12:15 this morning after 114 minutes and 41 seconds of tortured, torturous, terrific hockey, a war of attrition you started to think might take us all the way to Saturday’s 12:30 p.m. face-off for Game 4.
“It’s a game of wills,” Gaborik would say after scoring his first goal since Game 1 against the Senators, after willing a puck past Braden Holtby and delivering a 2-1, triple-overtime victory for the Rangers and a 2-1 advantage in these best-of-seven Eastern Conference Semifinals.
Yes. A game of wills. And a game of Gatorade, chugged by the gallon by all 40 players to keep from passing out, and a game of bananas, scarfed in bunches by both sides, the potassium keeping legs from morphing to dust after night became morning, after both teams squandered splendid opportunity after splendid opportunity by making one gut-check stop after another.
“Playoff hockey,” Brian Boyle said, looking like he was ready for a good 14- or 15-hour nap. “It’s what you dream about as a kid, right? And then it was like none of us wanted the dream to end, like we would be out there forever.”
One of the reasons it took so long was because Boyle accidentally got in the way of a Mike Rupp shot in the second overtime, Rupp staring at a goal that was absolutely wide open until Boyle’s bottom got in the way.
“Yeah,” Boyle said sheepishly. “I told him I’m sorry.”
So they played on, and they played ferociously, each shift a personal test of endurance for everyone on the ice, every period a wicked examination of the soul. The teams had exchanged goals in the second period and gone empty in periods 1, 3, 4 and 5. It was excruciating. It was exhilarating. It was exasperating. And you couldn’t take your eyes off it. Could you? Even when you heard Jered Weaver was tossing a no-no out in California; did you dare take your eye off the screen?
“I felt all along that the longer the game went, the better off we’d be,” Rangers coach John Tortorella said, and he mentioned how all the way back in training camp – which started early for the Rangers, remember, thanks to that early trip to Stockholm – he could see the strain of tenacity that ran through the roster top to bottom.
“It’s simple,” he said. “It’s about just not giving in.”
None of them did. Not the forwards, who looked like they could barely stand up yet kept dropping to the ice a hundred minutes into the game to take pucks to the ribs, shoulders and thighs. Not the blue-liners, who kept frustrating the onrushing Capitals. Certainly not the magnificent King, Henrik Lundqvist, who set aside 45 of 46 shots.
And not Gaborik, around whose playoff performances so many hands had been wrung, so many heads scratched. Of course it was Gaborik who would end this, who would send thousands of fans scurrying for the Metro before it closed at 1 a.m., who would justify his coach and his teammates’ faith and their patience.
“Everybody contributed,” he said after he’d sent everyone home. “Everybody left everything out there.”
Same as he did. And for his troubles, Marian Gaborik – like Stephane Matteau and Pete Stemkowski before him – will never have to buy another drink in Manhattan for as long as he lives.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com