And there is one.
It didn’t come easy, of course, because the good things in sports — like life — rarely do. You probably didn’t breathe much across the match’s final 20 minutes, and you probably wake up this morning shaking your head that after the brutal winter we all just lived through, you find yourself grateful for snow. Of all things.
But you have a hockey season left, and so do the Rangers, who have this 2-1 victory that buys them 48 extra hours, gets them to Friday night at least, to Game 5, to Staples Center. Theirs will be a sweet 3,000-mile flight, with the promise of an even sweeter one if they can parlay this.
But we get ahead of ourselves.
If you have bought into the possibility the Rangers can pull off this climb back from 0-3, then you were no doubt looking for signs and portents, and you got two of them: two pucks — one in the first period, one in the third — that somehow reached the goal line yet proceeded no further. The first one, the Rangers were fortunate Jeff Carter couldn’t get his stick on the ice to nudge it the extra 3 inches.
The second? Be grateful for snow in June, for a perfectly placed mini-drift that slowed the puck just enough, stopped it where it sat on the red line, where Henrik Lundqvist somehow didn’t accidentally kick it backward, where Derek Stepan got to it with his glove and shoved it under his goalie.
“I just don’t want that to go in there,” Stepan explained.
Maybe it will only be a footnote to this series if the Kings go home and finish this Friday night, or any of the three more opportunities they’ll have to close out the Stanley Cup finals. Or maybe, by this time next week, we’ll see those two stalled pucks as Kevin Millar’s walk and Dave Roberts’ steal.
Anything is still possible.
Even the wildly improbable.
“We worked hard for this,” said Martin St. Louis, who scored what proved to be the game-winning goal 6 ½ minutes into the second period. “And we were rewarded with our first win.”
That was the end of the easy portion of the game, of course. A little more than two minutes later, Dustin Brown beat Lundqvist on a breakaway, it was 2-1, and so the final 31 minutes would be a scary test of the Rangers’ heart and the crowd’s nervous system.
The Kings kept coming, and coming, and throwing pucks at the net, kept throwing their bodies at the boards and themselves at the crease because … well, because of course they did, because the Stanley Cup was in the building, close enough that they could practically feel it in their fingers.
If you believed the Kings were going to hold their best in reserve, were saving themselves for a grander ceremony on home ice, then you don’t know hockey players very well, who believe in all manner of jinxes and good-luck charms and bad omens who will barely look at conference-championship trophies because tradition insists you only acknowledge the one they hand out at the end.
So if the Rangers were going to keep their season alive, if they were going to make it to a team charter bound for California, they would get there because they outplayed the Kings, because they out-willed them, and out-fought them, and because their goalie was going to do everything short of handing out the boarding passes himself.
“Our goaltender stood tall,” Rangers coach Alain Vignault said. “He gave us a chance.”
He did. They all did. Forty saves on the night. Forty-eight more hours of season, at least, 48 more hours to ponder the improbable.
And there is one.