NHL

Rangers heartbroken after season-ending loss to Devils

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(N.Y. Post: Charles Wenzelberg)

DETHRONED: Henrik Lundqvist made 26 saves last night in Game 6, but it wasn’t enough to save the Rangers’ season against the Devils. (
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Eighteen years later, the Rangers couldn’t get the third goal. Eighteen years later, the Rangers couldn’t get to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals at the Garden. Eighteen years later, the Rangers are going home and the Devils are going to the Stanley Cup finals.

An unexpectedly rewarding season in which the organization’s progress accelerated by leaps and bounds—from eighth in the East, 18th overall in the NHL and a five-game first-round defeat in the playoffs last year to first in the conference, second overall in the NHL and three rounds in the playoffs— still ended bitterly for the Rangers.

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It ended bitterly when Adam Henrique stuffed home a loose puck off a wild scramble just 1:03 in overtime to lift the Devils to a 3-2 Game 6 victory in the Battle of the Hudson that forever takes the onus of 1994 off the New Jersey franchise and of the remarkable Martin Brodeur, if the three Stanley Cup championships in the interim hadn’t already done that.

“It’s tough to grasp what happened,” Brian Boyle told the Post just minutes into a summer for him and his team that no doubt will seem endless. “I just didn’t see it going that way.

“I’m pretty numb right now.”

The series ended bitterly for the Rangers, but not prematurely, not really, not with the Devils the better team for most of the series, even if not for most of the second and third periods last night when the Blueshirts rallied from 2-0 down in the first to tie, just as their ancestors had 18 years ago in Game 6.

But this time there was no third goal just as there had been no third goal for the Rangers in 13 of their 20 games in a tournament through which they won 10 and lost 10 and had an inordinate amount of trouble establishing a game beyond Henrik Lundqvist, commitment, shot-blocking and composure in their own end of the ice.

Did the Rangers play with heart in the playoffs? There’s no doubt about it. They did, and to a degree that even impressed John Tortorella, the coach who responded to this defeat with equanimity and who said of his team, “I like our jam, I like our [guts], I really like what we have.”

Still, there wasn’t one time in the playoffs, let alone in this series, when the Rangers truly looked like the best team in hockey, wasn’t one game that ended with the sense that you had just watched the 2012 Stanley Cup champions.

The degree of difficulty the Rangers had in being forced to seven games against both an ordinary Ottawa team that played inspired hockey and a mediocre Washington team that saw fit to reduce Alex Ovechkin to a support player was both troubling and a harbinger of trouble to come against a very good team from New Jersey.

Brad Richards, who lost the puck in the neutral zone to set off the chain reaction that ended the season in OT and who was on his knees in the crease groping for the disc before Henrique could find it, had a miserable series against the Devils.

Marian Gaborik was neither a factor in the east finals, nor a formidable force throughout the playoffs. Sophomore Derek Stepan scored one goal overall — a power-play goal in Game 6 of the first round—in struggling through his second playoffs in two years.

“Some guys handled this very well and some guys didn’t,” said Tortorella, who of course declined to elaborate. “There was some really good stuff, but there were other things that worry me, to be honest.”

This notion that last night’s game was a referendum on Lundqvist after the King had stubbed his toe on the bridge across the moat leading to his castle was ridiculous. The goaltender was the team’s best player in pretty much every one of his team’s victories.

Still, Lundqvist is now 30 and without a Cup. Brodeur, who won his first when he was 23, is 40 and going for his fourth.

“I felt my level was where I wanted it to be, but it’s a shock to have it end this way,” Lundqvist said. “So many things that happened during the year and during the playoffs, I felt like we had something special.

“As a player you hope the signs mean that something exciting will happen. But it wasn’t our year. And it’s going to be a long summer.”

The summer starts today for the Rangers as the chase for the Cup continues for the Devils.

Eighteen years ago is now history in every sense of the word.