Sure, if you sat around and thought about it, you could summon the image of Jerry West’s halfcourt shot and Endy Chavez’ catch and, yes, why not, Valeri Zelepukin’s goal, all the times we’ve been taught through the years that nothing is inevitable in sports, no matter how epic the moment feels, how storybook the script seems.
We know, intellectually, that West’s Lakers and Chavez’ Mets and Zelepukin’s Devils didn’t back up those forever heroics with victory. And yet it was possible, last night, to forget all of it. It was possible, as the Rangers mounted this thrilling comeback from three goals down to even just 17 seconds into the third period, to interpret a sense of inevitability.
Of course the Rangers were going to win this one. Of course they would figure out a way to score that fourth unanswered goal, if not by the end of regulation then sometime in overtime, or double OT, or quintuple OT …
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“Only we didn’t,” Brian Boyle said, stone-faced. “We never got that fourth goal.”
They didn’t get the fourth goal, and they didn’t get the third win in these Eastern Conference Finals, and so they must now go to the Jersey side to retrieve their season tomorrow night, they must go back to the Rock with their backs to the brink. It ended 5-3 and it sent 18,200 people to the escalators muttering to themselves in disbelief; this couldn’t be the last time they’d see the Rangers at the Garden this season, could it?
Could it?
“We just got to win a game,” Ryan Callahan said, this after the Rangers’ captain had done everything in his power to salvage this game, scoring once, missing another by as thin a space as the law allows. “We’ve been in this situation in the Ottawa series. Just win one road game and get on a roll out here.”
Maybe that’s why those first two rounds were such tortured, torturous gauntlets for the Rangers. Maybe that’s why they were meant to endure them, so they would not be cowed at the prospect of commuting to Newark and rescuing their season from what promises to be a wholly hostile gathering on the other side of the river.
They’ve already survived three elimination games, after all, already stared at the abyss and spit over the edge before pivoting away. Surely, those examinations weren’t passed in vain, right? Surely there had to be a higher purpose for enduring that, no?
Well, you’d like to think so. But you would also liked to have believed that once the Rangers got the gift equalizer 17 seconds into the third period – Martin Brodeur all but handing the puck to Marian Gaborik on a misplay, then nudging it past his own goal line – that there was little way the Devils could survive what was in front of them. The Rangers had dominated the previous 30 minutes and would rule the next 10, too.
The Garden opted for a song.
“MAAAAAAAAAAR- TEEEEEEEE!”
“MAAAAAAAAAAR- TEEEEEEEE!”
The Devils were sputtering. Everyone was simply waiting for a time of death to scrawl on the scorecard.
And then – suddenly, shockingly, impossibly – the puck was on Ryan Carter’s stick, and then it was past Henrik Lundqvist’s pads, and the silence that followed was enough to send chills down your spine.
“We were coming,” Boyle said. “We knew it. They knew it.”
He shook his head.
“And then it didn’t matter.”
So now they cross the river, same as they did 18 years ago. Today is the anniversary of Mark Messier’s guarantee, tomorrow of his hat trick that delivered it into history. We are more likely to see John Tortorella take an open-mike shift at the Laugh Lounge tonight than any Ranger try to channel Messier, and that’s fine. The guarantee has always been less impressive than the game that followed it. That’s what the Rangers need now. They need a win far more than any faux machismo.
“We lost a game, we move on, we get ready for the next one,” Tortorella said, and if ever a team seemed prepared to do just that, it should be a team that’s already dodged three bullets, knows the dance down pat. Why shouldn’t they believe in themselves? They’ve come too far to start voting any other way.