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Everything that’s been accomplished this season is wiped clean. Stockholm is not only a long time ago and far, far away, it represents a different galaxy of hockey.
The Rangers are no longer in first place. No one is. When the playoffs begin at Madison Square Garden tonight against Ottawa, the one-seed Blueshirts have the same 0-0 record as the eight-seed Senators, with each club the same 16 victories away from the Stanley Cup.
And yet, the success of the 51-win, 109-point regular-season has elevated the Rangers to a different platform entering this postseason in which they have home-ice advantage for so much as a round for the first time since 1996.
The Rangers aren’t sneaking in by the scruffs of the collective neck the way they did last year, pretty much the way they always have made it lately. They’re not booked for the tour in steerage class.
They go into tonight’s Game 1 not grateful to be included, but rather with great expectations.
“It feels as if there’s more at stake this time,” Brian Boyle told The Post. “When I was at [Boston College], we’d pretty much win Hockey East all the time, and that was nice, but no one was really excited about that if we didn’t win the NCAA.
“I feel this situation is more or less the same. We’re happy with the way we performed, but by no means are we satisfied,” said the center, who was one of his club’s best players in last year’s first-round defeat to the Capitals. “It’s good to have the No. 1 seed, but we have to make it work for us.
“When I set my goal before the season, it wasn’t to finish first, it was to win the Stanley Cup.”
There aren’t any shortcuts. The Rangers can’t triple-jump their way to June. They must attend to the task at hand and remain committed to the same meat-and-potatoes menu that brought the team to the dance.
“I’m excited and ready for this challenge,” said Marian Gaborik, who scored 41 goals while playing the full 82-game schedule for the first time in his 11-year career. “This is the first time I’m on a team that’s a favorite, and that’s a good feeling, but we all have to recognize that we can’t change our approach just because it’s the playoffs.
“We have to have the same mentality and bring it up another level.”
The Rangers must get the puck deep and establish a forecheck. They must be diligent coming back. The Senators are loaded with skilled players who will take a mile if given an inch. Focus and detail always matter, but never more so than over the course of a best-of-seven where adjustments to adjustments are made on the fly.
“We’ve gone to school on them and I’m sure they have done the same regarding us,” Gaborik said. “We aren’t going to change who we are, but we have to be ready to address issues when they come up.”
And, if things go sour, they must respond with cool heads.
“You can’t start smashing your stick or get frustrated,” Mike Rupp said. “You have to keep it steady all the time.”
The greatest burden, of course, falls on Henrik Lundqvist, who must be mundanely magnificent in order to give his team a chance to win not only 16 games, but four, one at a time.
The King was asked yesterday if he had received a good luck text from his countryman and friend Daniel Alfredsson, the Ottawa captain.
“I’ll have to check my phone,” Lundqvist said. “During the series, we are not friends. [If I send him a good-luck text back], I don’t know if I would mean it.”
larry.brooks@nypost.com