PITTSBURGH — High-pitched cheers echoed through the hallway, carried around one corner, and up another. There were yelps and hollers and a collective release of emotion from the Rangers locker room that was deeper and more involved than it sounded on the surface.
It was the aftermath of yet another momentous Game 7 for the Rangers, this one a 2-1 triumph on Tuesday night over the Penguins at Consol Energy Center, moving the Blueshirts on to the Eastern Conference final against the winner of the Bruins-Canadiens series, which reaches its own Game 7 crescendo on Wednesday night in Boston.
“It’s just going to get a lot more fun,” defenseman Ryan McDonagh said.
This was the Rangers’ fifth consecutive Game 7 win, and they are now in the conference final for the second time in the past three seasons. But this one was different from the past, carrying more emotion and more subplot — although the same superlative goaltender — than those before it.
Because inside the locker room stood Martin St. Louis, the shortest-tenured Ranger, and yet the one around which this team has rallied. St. Louis’s mother, France, died Thursday, less than 24 hours before Game 5.
At that moment, the Rangers were down in the best-of-seven series, 3-1, a deficit they had never come back from in franchise history. They were facing the ultra-talented Penguins team that finished 13 points ahead of them for the crown of the Metropolitan Division. And yet the Rangers had this galvanizing circumstance that enabled them to believe, somehow, in accomplishing a task that previously seemed unmanageable.
“I know she was with me the whole way,” said St. Louis, who had just one goal in this series, but made a no-look, backhand pass, feeding his old Tampa Bay running mate Brad Richards for a power-play goal 7:56 into the second period that was the game-winner.
“After Game 4, we felt pretty bad about where we stood in the series,” St. Louis said. “I think every one of us, we didn’t like our game. Obviously, the passing of my mom, it puts everything in perspective. I think we really rallied from that situation. And I couldn’t be more proud to be a New York Ranger.”
But if there is someone who defines this group, it is the masked man between the pipes. Henrik Lundqvist was utterly outstanding yet again, making 35 saves, some jaw-dropping, some so technically sound it was hard to notice how good they were — and the biggest ones without his stick.
“That was chaos,” Lundqvist said about a play with five minutes left in the third period when his stick was on the ice, underneath him, and James Neal and Evgeni Malkin both got shots off he somehow stopped. “It’s just one of the moments when there are people everywhere, the puck is all over the place, but you try just to be in the way. I did my part, and the guys in front of me did theirs.”
The Rangers got out to a 1-0 lead 5:25 into the first when Brian Boyle finally found tangible evidence for his continued terrific play in the postseason when he blocked a shot, started a rush up ice, and then buried a feed from Dominic Moore. But it was washed out when the Penguins began their push in the second, getting a rebound goal from Jussi Jokinen 4:15 in.
But from there, Lundqvist shut it down, allowing for Richards’ goal to stand up as the winner, and for the Rangers to now try and do better than the last time they were here, in 2012, when the Devils stopped them two wins short of playing for the Stanley Cup.
“Yeah, he’s OK,” first-year coach Alain Vigneault said about Lundqvist. “When they took their game to another level, our goaltender took his game to another level. He was able to stop a barrage of opportunities, and he was the difference in the game.”
A game that got them to another challenge, another series, an one more step closer to the ultimate goal.
“I don’t know any teams in history of NHL that gets to the final four,” Richards said, “and didn’t believe they can win.’’
