NHL

RANGERS MOVE UP IN PLAYOFF RACE

MONTREAL – Now they have strung together strong performances back to back. Now the Rangers look as if they will have to be reckoned with the rest of the way.

It was 4-3 here last night over the Canadiens in a shootout during which the Rangers went three-for-three against a Still Not Ready for Primetime Carey Price, and even though Montreal did get the loser’s point, the point is that the Blueshirts are playing their best hockey of the season.

“We’ve become a very aggressive team in every sense,” said Paul Mara, part of a defense corps that punished the Canadiens all night long, taking the body and with menace at every opportunity. “We’re on the attack, and we’re not shying away from anything anywhere on the ice.”

Mara was assertive, so was Dan Girardi, so was Marc Staal and so, for the second straight game, was Wade Redden. As the defense did its best to make every small and fleet Canadien pay the toll for crossing the blue line, the Rangers crashed Price’s crease all night and dominated down low, controlling the play for rolling shifts at a time.

Remember the first couple of games under John Tortorella when the head coach suggested the Blueshirts weren’t quite in good enough shape to play the up-tempo hockey he demands? Well, they’re obviously in shape now, as last night’s third period in which the Rangers outshot Montreal 16-2 through the first 14 minutes can attest.

“We’re wearing teams down,” said Chris Drury, who got the decisive shootout tally after Markus Naslund and Nik Antropov had preceded him. “The key is, when you’re skating, you’re there, so you can make the hit and be physical.

“When you’re on your heels skating backwards, it’s a little bit tougher to play that way.”

The problem in the third, however, came when Montreal’s third shot of the period, a bad angle left wing drive by Andrei Markov somehow glanced off Henrik Lundqvist’s right shoulder and slipped through on the short side to tie the score 3-3 at 15:07, 4:09 after Ryan Callahan had banged in a rebound from in front.

“We weren’t going to let that get us down; we were just going to keep going, and we did,” Drury said. “We weren’t going to let that get in our heads.”

Sean Avery, not quite as effective as he’d been on Sunday, took an elbow in the head in the first period and was impeded going to the net without the puck in the second, but did not get a call either time. Referee Bill McCreary, a shell of the official he once was, and who makes things up as he goes along, apparently saw nothing. Avery did, however, draw a slashing penalty on Mike Komisarek late in the second.

It’s interesting. Even playing attack hockey, the Rangers yielded next to nothing in the way of odd-man rushes to the counter-attack oriented and headman-instinctive Habs. What a difference from the early games under Tortorella stretching through Saturday’s defeat in Philadelphia – where the Rangers left as much as they took.

“That game in Philly gave Torts the perfect video to show us and teach us,” said Drury, whose team is 6-2 in their last eight and three points clear of ninth place. “We saw how exposed we could get when we didn’t have our third guy high, so we’ve been committed to correcting that.

“We’re still as aggressive, but we’ve been smarter and better.”

The timing couldn’t be better.

larry.brooks@nypost.com

Rangers 4 Canadiens 3