It had taken a good 25 minutes of game time for anyone inside Madison Square Garden to breathe, so they were going to wear their lungs out now, and their throats, and their voiceboxes. It has been 18 long years since the last time they’d enjoyed a Game 7 here — you remember how that one turned out, right? — and there was no need to let any of it stay inside any longer.
The buzzer groaned and the Ottawa Senators filed onto the ice, some of them swinging their sticks in frustration at the goal, some of them slamming the boards, all of them taking one last look at the numbers that were sending the 18,200 people in the stands into a giddy frenzy.
Rangers 2, Senators 1.
“We threw everything we had left at them,” Ottawa goalie Craig Anderson would lament a few minutes later. “And they had an answer for all of it.”
Maybe the Rangers hadn’t expected to be fighting for their season so early in these playoffs, not after the 82-game grind that had yielded the No. 1 seed in the East and the privilege of playing the eighth-seeded Senators. Any delusions of Ottawa’s worth vanished quickly, and if anyone missed the point, Monday’s elimination game certainly provided an extra dose of agida.
But the Rangers survived that. After losing Game 5, coach John Tortorella had insisted things always happen for a reason in hockey, implying that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad test of his team’s mettle — or its brass — if it faced a crucible so early in this run.
“I believed that,” Tortorella insisted last night. “It wasn’t just something I said. I really believed we would win in Ottawa.”
He shook his head.
“We found a way,” he said.
They found a way, and now find themselves in a second-round series with their nemesis, a Washington Capitals team that didn’t even qualify for the playoffs until Game 81, that won a seven-game series with the Bruins that wasn’t decided until overtime of the last, a series of seven one-goal games that surely has the Caps believing in the very same destiny the Rangers no doubt do.
With a little history on their side, to boot.
“I haven’t even thought about that yet,” Tortorella said, insisting he was going to let his players — and presumably himself — enjoy a series win for a solid 60 minutes before starting to fret about Alex Ovechkin and friends, who have ousted the Rangers the last two times they were in the postseason.
But maybe that’s another example of what Tortorella was talking about last week; something else that’s happened for a reason, another plot twist placing the Rangers right in the crosshairs of their chief conference tormentors. The Rangers certainly seem better equipped to compete this time around, and they’ll have home ice, and they’ll have the experience of having stared into the abyss and executing a U-turn.
“I know we are a confident group,” said Ryan Callahan, the team captain. “I knew we were going to come out hard, especially at home. We knew we were going to get off to a good start and we did, and then we built on it.”
It took longer than anyone wanted to crack the ice, but once Marc Staal beat Anderson 4 minutes and 46 seconds into the second period, the Rangers were a more confident team and the Garden a more confident crowd.
“A little more edge to them tonight,” goalie Henrik Lund-qvist said. “A little more energy. And a great, great feeling being out there in the middle of it all.”
Especially at the end, the Senators making one desperate rush after another at the Rangers, trying to sneak their way into overtime, trying to kick the plugs out at the Garden. It was then, at the end, when you remembered precisely what Game 7 is supposed to sound like. And, at the final horn, what it’s supposed to look like: vanquished Senators mourning, triumphant Rangers celebrating. They found a way.
micheal.vaccaro@nypost.com