NHL

Resilient Rangers continue to be road warriors

OUCH: The Rangers’ Brandon Prust delivers an elbow to the back of the head of the Devils’ Anton Volchenkov in the second period of the Blueshirts’ 3-0 victory yesterday. (N.Y. Post: Charles Wenzelberg)

Afterward, one of the things everyone wanted to talk to the Rangers about was how efficient they were all five times they were a man down yesterday afternoon. Five times they sent a man to the penalty box — “living dangerously,” is the way coach John Tortorella put it — and five times they thwarted the Devils.

So, yes: The Rangers are quite effective at the penalty kill.

But what they are really good at is the buzz-kill.

Three times now, the Rangers have proffered hope and optimism to three different teams and three different cities for critical Game 3s, and not only because they did the Senators, the Capitals and the Devils huge solids by losing Game 2s and surrendering home ice.

No, all three times they also spent most of Game 3 building on that hope, whipping enemy arenas into frenzies because they looked so vulnerable, so susceptible, so … beatable. It was 0-0 after two periods in Ottawa. It was 1-1 after five periods in Washington.

And yesterday, in Newark, it was 0-0 after two, same as it been 0-0 after two in Game 1 of this series. It was 0-0 and that felt like the most fortunate kind of optical illusion, because the Devils had spent so much of the game’s opening 40 minutes in the Rangers’ zone, had peppered Henrik Lunqvist with shots and scoring chances, with breakaways and odd-man rushes.

“They were aggressive and they were sharp,” Marc Staal said, “and it helps to have one of the greatest goaltenders in the world on your side.”

It does. And Lundqvist was brilliant, and by the end of this 3-0 victory they were chanting the goalie’s name, Rangers fans having driven the Devils fans to the parking lots and the train station and the Turnpike. But as great as he was, as great as he is, this was yet another signature team win in a spring already overstuffed with them, another day when the Rangers played Lucy on another city’s Charlie Brown, pulling the ball away abruptly.

Killing the buzz.

Restoring their own brand of order, and ardor, to the proceedings.

“They came after us pretty hard,” Ryan Callahan, the captain whose empty-netter tied a pretty bow around the afternoon’s festivities, said when it was over. “But we withstood it. And we weathered it.”

That is what we may well remember the Rangers for at season’s end, whether the run ends in a few days, in a few weeks or along the Canyon of Heroes. Every few days they are angels of hope, nudging the door ajar ever so slightly for the Senators/Capitals/Devils, getting their own fans paranoid that one big outburst by Alfredsson/Ovechkin/Kovalchuk on home ice could doom them … only to call the cops on the kegger just as things were getting interesting.

In Ottawa, that happened twice, including a season-saver in Game 6. At Washington, Game 3 and its three overtimes proved the Rangers could be resilient (and could actually win in overtime after seven straight postseason failures). And now this. Deadlocked at 0-0 after 40 minutes, the Rangers looked like a different team almost immediately in the third, and Dan Girardi proved it at 3:19 with a power-play goal, and Chris Kreider, of course, underlined it with another goal less than two minutes later.

And suddenly, a day-long party in Newark was flat-lined, and the chants that had filled the building not long before — notably “Marty’s better!” — had vanished. One more time, the Rangers had extended an olive branch only to reveal, at the last minute, that it was covered in grease. One more time they had offered a mirage of hope.

One more time, they had helped build a buzz that they were ripe to be taken out.

Then they killed that buzz like a hunter sizing up a nine-point buck.

The Devils looked beaten by game’s end, and so did their supporters. There will be other things to latch onto now, notably the shot Brandon Prust delivered with his elbow to Anton Volchenkov’s head, which Devils coach Pete DeBoer unabashedly declared “headhunting.” Perhaps we will see a goon or two in the Devils lineup tomorrow night.

Maybe that will generate some buzz. Good luck with that.