After awhile, as a fan, you sense these things, don’t you? Life was too good. These Eastern Conference finals were going too smoothly. The Rangers were swarming the Canadiens again, throttling them, dominating them …
They just weren’t scoring against them. Not after the early 1-0 lead. Not even as they piled up a remarkable shot advantage that meant little when the Canadiens tied it, then went ahead … The kid goalie, Dustin Tokarski, was sublime, and also ridiculous, and even when the equalizer slithered past him with less than half a minute left in regulation, well …
There was still a nagging sense of: This should be over. This should be done. This should be 3-0 for the Rangers, and we should be on the West Side Highway or the FDR Drive or inside the train back home to Huntington.
Instead, 72 seconds into overtime, what had been one of the loudest, proudest hockey gatherings in years was commuted to silence, 18,006 voice boxes stilled, the silence delivering a definitive message:
Oh, bleep.
Oh, no.
And suddenly, the merry romp to the Cup Finals meets a speed bump, Montreal now down 2-1 in the series after winning 3-2 in this must-have Game 3. What a buzzkill. What a bummer. For these are the days you crave as a fan, aren’t they? To somehow be playing with the house’s money, yet still be sitting pretty, sitting in what Red Barber used to call the old catbird’s seat.
Around the city, around the Garden, hockey ruled the day in a way it may not have ruled any day going back to June the 14th of 1994, when the Rangers held off the Canucks, ended the Curse and for a while allowed New York to become every bit the hockey town that Detroit is, or Boston, or Buffalo.
“And even then,” John Keefe is saying, “I never felt like I could truly enjoy that ride. That was nerve-wracking the whole way, and when it ended it was as much relief and joy.”
“This,” Keefe’s buddy, Larry Greenstein, says, “is all joy.”
“Well,” Keefe quickly adds. “It is now.”
Keefe and Greenstein were sharing a pregame pint at a bar on West 33rd Street, a long slap shot away from the Garden, and they were giddy.
This is an era when discontent so often rules the day among the truest believers in New York City. The Mets seem to relish inventing ways to alienate their fans. The Knicks specialized in slapstick most of the winter. Football season was a shared study in frustration, Jets and Giants slipping on banana peels all across the fall.
And look: Until recently, the Rangers seemed ready to vault themselves right into the middle of this mess, too. Sixteen days ago, they were booed right out of this building after no-showing against the Penguins in Game 4 of the Eastern semis, falling behind three games to one.
Rangers fans weren’t just pessimistic in those bad old days; they were convinced the end was nigh. So that’s where the house money kicked in.
That’s where just having a hockey season this late into May felt like a gift for the whole city, even the many peripheral fans who only adopt a team when given proper motivation. You survive 1-3 down, you get to feel like whatever follows is gravy.
Until the gravy is spackled in gold, too …
“We don’t talk about what we’re really thinking,” Keefe says.
“I’m [ticked] that you would even say that much,” Greenstein says.
And this is what the catbird’s seat looked like, and sounded like, for most of Thursday night, the Garden in full voice, fully engaged, looking for blood, looking to chase the Canadiens back to the border, the Rangers’ play shadowing the crowd, the mood of crowd and team working in concert.
Here they were, up 2-0 on the Canadiens, both of those victories coming in hockey-mad Montreal, under all those championship banners, trolling all that history. And now, of course, came the great fan conflict: brewing excitement, unbridled happiness, limitless possibility …
All of it tempered …
All of it contained …
And all of it …
Well, every bit of it justified, as it turned out.