NHL

Local hockey teams provide genuine rivals

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(Bill Kostroun)

(Bill Kostroun)

We’ve been trying to fill the hole in our sporting hearts since long before many of us were born. We are a metropolis still smarting from the betrayal of two National League baseball teams, that’s yearned to replicate the ’40s and the ’50s, when New York was home to three ballclubs, each representing a different segment of the city’s soul.

We force it sometimes. For years we dreamed about another Subway Series, tried to ascribe extra meaning to the annual interleague games, then actually got a World Series between the Yankees and the Mets that, let’s be honest, was like a Christmas morning when you wanted G.I Joe with the kung-fu grip and wound up with a sweater instead.

We’ve never gotten anything close to a Giants-Jets Super Bowl, so every time they play each other we try to turn them into the Sharks and the Jets instead. We tried to turn Week 16 last year into Bull Run, into some kind of football referendum. Basketball? The Knicks and the Nets have never generated any heat at all, and just because they occupy neighboring boroughs, we should know by now that proximity won’t guarantee passion.

Meanwhile, for close to 40 years, hockey has been giving us precisely what we were missing. It’s perfect, too: As in our baseball yesterdays, we have three teams. They represent three distinctly different aspects of our sporting melting pot — the urbane city, the Jersey commuters, the Long Island suburbanites.

And the games … o, lord, the games.

We can start on the evening of April 11, 1975, when a former joke known as the New York Islanders shocked the city and the sport in the space of 11 seconds. That’s how long it took for Jude Drouin to win an overtime face-off from Jean Ratelle, tip the puck to Dave Lewis, get the puck back, and whip it through the crease onto J.P. Parise’s stick. Parise beat Ed Giacomin, and the Islanders, in their third year of existence, had eliminated the mighty Rangers.

“It’s like a big dream,” Parise said that night. “All of a sudden, the puck’s on my stick. It’s the most rewarding goal I’ve ever scored.”

Thirty-seven years later, Parise’s son, Zach, will wear the captain’s “C” for the Devils tonight when they collide with the Rangers in the Eastern Conference finals at Madison Square Garden. Parise’s father earned a permanent place in Islanders lore for his goal, and the son has already experienced Devils-Rangers in the postseason, winning in ’06, losing two years later.

Parise to Parise, Rangers to Islanders to Devils, these intramural hockey series have almost invariably been precisely what the baseball rivalries used to be back in the day, only better, because there have been more of them.

There was the Rangers paying the Islanders back four years after Parise, in 1979, the Islanders on the brink of dynasty, John Davidson and Phil Esposito and the Maloney brothers putting that all on ice with an impossible six-game win in the conference finals. There were four other meetings once the Islanders became the ISLANDERS, an Isles sweep in 1981, six-game Islanders wins in ’82 and ’83, and then an epic best-of-five in ’84 when Ken Morrow scored in OT of Game 5.

“If we had lost,” Islander Bob Bourne, a veteran of all six series, said that night, “it would have been impossible for us to live here.”

The Islanders helped christen the Devils’ rise from Mickey Mouse to mighty, surrendering a six-game series to Jim Schoenfeld’s overachieving bunch in 1988, and the Rangers provided a similar initiation in 1992. But it was in 1994 when we were reminded of the power of proximity when it’s properly impassioned. We still speak in solemn tones about that one.

And even if the Devils have tripled the number of Cups the Rangers have won since then, earlier this year Martin Brodeur admitted, “That series still gets to me.”

Of course it does. Losing is bad enough. You lose to your neighbors? Well, ask Ralph Branca how that feels. Or, even better: ask Brodeur. Or Clark Gillies. Or Henrik Lundqvist, swept out of the playoffs by the Devils as a rookie. Ask your brother the Islanders fan, your uncle the Rangers fan, your neighbor the Devils fan.

Turns out we’ve had what we’ve been looking for the whole time. Starting tonight, we get it all over again. Enjoy.