BOSTON — There he was, a Ranger who finally had enough of Brad Marchand and his verbal challenges.
There he was, a Ranger not only standing his ground, but standing up for his teammates.
There was Derick Brassard, of all people, dropping his stick and gloves with about four minutes remaining in the second period of Thursday night’s live-or-die Game 4 at the Garden after dueling with the Boston agitator in front of Henrik Lundqvist’s net.
And there was Marchand skating away from the challenge as play continued, leaving the Blueshirts center to gather his equipment and scramble back into the action.
Let’s just say that four games of familiarity has bred a bit of contempt for Marchand.
“Sometimes he doesn’t show any respect for his opponents,” Brassard told The Post following yesterday’s prep work for tonight’s Game 5. “He’s been asking everybody on our team to fight all series, so I thought it was time to take him up on it, but then I guess he didn’t have any interest.”
Marchand once got away with popping Daniel Sedin in the face with a half-dozen gloved lefts in the final minutes of the Bruins’ Game 6 victory over Vancouver in the 2011 finals without a Canuck so much as raising a finger in protest. He’s one of those guys who constantly agitates and apparently claims he’s ready to fight, but won’t.
Fact is, Brassard and Marchand each have four career fighting majors. The dastardly Marchand has fought Mike Ribeiro, P.K. Subban, Matt Niskanen and Andrew Cogliano while the gentlemanly Brassard’s fight card features bouts against Dan Boyle, Lubomir Visnovsky, Matt Cooke and James Neal, according to hockeyfights.com.
“[Marchand] can be effective at what he does, but sometimes he pushes it too far,” said Brassard, who had his best game of the conference semis in the Rangers’ 4-3 overtime victory. “He can get on your nerves if you don’t handle it the right way.
“Like I said, he’s been asking everyone on our team to fight. So at that point I thought enough was enough. I thought that was the time to deal with it,” No. 16 said. “Either he didn’t want to [fight] or his coach didn’t want him to.
“You have to make sure you don’t allow him to get you off your game. That’s what he always tries to do. So you deal with it and you move on.”
So a Ranger dealt with Marchand. And the Rangers moved on to fight — or, not — another day.
➤The uproar and outrage around the NHL over John Tortorella’s decision to designate Brad Richards as a healthy scratch for Game 4 (and until further notice) is not borne out of any type of objective hockey-based analysis.
Rather, it is a reflection of the enormous amount of goodwill that good guy Richards has cultivated throughout his career and the amount of antipathy that his black hat-wearing coach (and not the Broadway Hat, either) has invited throughout his tour of duty.
Honestly, if there’s one thing this was not, this was not Mike Keenan benching Brian Leetch against the Devils during Game 4 of the epochal 1994 conference finals.
Hey, there’s a subject for the next coach’s show on MSG.
➤ When Tortorella moved Brassard between Carl Hagelin and Ryan Callahan while shifting Derek Stepan between Chris Kreider and Rick Nash for Thursday’s third period and OT, that effectively switched the match against Zdeno Chara.
Stepan thereafter drew most of the time against the Big Z, while Brassard was freed for the majority of his shifts. Tortorella said he made the switch “because I didn’t think we were generating enough offense,” and not to change the match, but the move worked.
It was Stepan who stripped Chara behind the net before his continued motion wraparound goal to tie the match at 1:15 of the third period. And Brassard operated with more time and space.
“I got more confident against him after the first couple of games,” Brassard said. “You have to deal with his reach and how he likes to grab behind the net and in the corners.
“You want to make him skate and play facing his own net. He’s probably one of the top three defensemen in the league, but if you can do that, sometimes he makes poor decisions.”
larry.brooks@nypost.com