Afterward, they would recite from the familiar missals and mantras, talk about how they were outhustled and outworked and out-effort-ed, the whole laundry list of self-flagellation that accompanies all of the Rangers’ losses now.
It is possible that the Devils outplayed them, too, but we have come to realize that such concessions around the Rangers are tantamount to refusing to take a loyalty oath. The Senators outworked them three times. The Capitals outhustled them three times. Now the Devils have done it once.
Really, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Ranger this morning: blame yourself. Credit the Devils. Wake up tied, again, 1-1. Take the day off. Go back to work tomorrow. Litter the ice Saturday with bodies, litter those bodies with black-and-blue marks roughly the size of hockey parks.
Rinse. Return. Repeat.
And hope that the Devils, unlike the Senators, unlike the Capitals, aren’t ready to light the script on fire.
“We didn’t answer the bell,” Rangers captain Ryan Callahan said when this disheartening 3-2 loss was over, after the Devils had tied the series at a game apiece and dragged home-ice advantage back through the tunnel with them.
“We weren’t ready to play,” Carl Hagelin said.
Then, of course, there was John Tortorella, who luckily for him doesn’t get paid by the word, who was asked if his hockey team brought the right amount of effort to the rink last night.
“No,” he said.
Maybe this is how the Rangers have to be, how they have to behave, how they have to believe. They have earned every bouquet thrown their way this season because they play just about every day the way you want your team to play. They almost always give an honest effort. They almost always do the little things that allow winning teams to win so often.
At the start of the playoffs, it was fair to wonder if this would be enough, since it was, and is, such a glaring problem that it almost always seems to take an act of God and an Act of Congress to get them on the scoreboard. Across those two rounds, though, all they really did was underline and emphasize that it was their very nature, their tenacity, their stubbornness, their combativeness that allowed them to overcome.
“We play a certain way,” is the way Callahan put it, “and we believe in it fiercely.”
It is possible that they’ve met their match, though. It is possible that they’ve run into a team that buys into lunch pails and time cards every bit as much as the Rangers do. They are, after all, the Devils, and if they aren’t the eyesore grinders they were in their championship prime, they are still run by a man, Lou Lamoriello, who demands his own exacting levels of effort and commitment.
And it showed last night. It showed in how the Devils were unbowed by the 2-1 deficit that stared them in the face late in the second period, and showed even more in how they refused to budge off the lead once they snuck that third goal past Henrik Lundqvist. Most of all, it showed up in how they showed up last night. A lot of folks got carried away by the Rangers’ Game 1 win, and somehow the Devils were reduced to a sparring partner in a lot of precincts.
That narrative officially changes now. The road kill has gone rogue.
And now it’s the Rangers we have to find out about.
“What went wrong tonight, we can fix that,” Marc Staal said.
“It’s not like we haven’t been there before,” Callahan said.
They have lived there, in fact, unable to ever create a two-game lead at any time in these playoffs, always figuring a way to keep the train on the tracks, already surviving three elimination games just to get this far. Nobody questions their resolve, their resilience, their redoubtable heart.
It’s just that what the Rangers see when the peer across the ice looks awfully familiar all of a sudden. The Devils have survived two elimination games themselves. They can take a punch. And they don’t mind the grind, either.
“Nobody said this would be easy,” Callahan said.
Good thing.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com