LOS ANGELES — It was a silly way to put it, but in the visitors’ locker room at the Garden on Wednesday morning, Kings defenseman Willie Mitchell channeled Yogi Berra and gave us this bit of insight.
“If we give them light, they’ll take that light,” he said, “and there is just more light at the end of it.”
That was hours before the Rangers would go out and win Game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals, beating back Mitchell and the Kings for a 2-1 victory and beating back the summer by cutting their best-of-seven series lead to 3-1.
It was light that the Rangers were given, and it created this Game 5 on Friday night at Staples Center, another one when the Cup will arrive in its black crate, waiting for the Kings to summon it and traipse it around in front of their fans, or for the Rangers to tell it to get back on a plane and head East.
It’s a game the Rangers can now approach with some real hope, some real confidence, because they’ve now won their first Cup-finals game in 20 years, and shown they can beat the Kings even without playing their best game.
“We didn’t play a perfect game but we found a way,” veteran winger Martin St. Louis said after the game, when the Blueshirts were outshot, 41-19, including a 15-1 margin in the final 20 minutes, held together at the seams by a superlative performance from goalie Henrik Lundqvist.
“For the most part, we played hard, and we got rewarded with our first win,” St. Louis said. “We’ve been waiting for a few games for that. We keep trying to stay alive.”
Alive is the key word for the Rangers, as this whole season — and, really, whole careers of those on the team and in the organization — could be defined by what happens in the next day, or the next week. To speak the unspeakable, if the Rangers did come back to win this series, it would have to rival the sanctity of that 1994 Rangers team, the one that ended the 54-year championship drought and the most recent band of Blueshirts to even make it this far.
But that would be the long view, and that certainly is not the way the team is looking at it now. With a practice out here on Thursday, there was a refocusing towards one more game, a single goal of one win rather than three.
“When you’re in a hole like we were, down three, you just have to take it one at a time,” said Rick Nash, who has shown an unbelievable ability to contribute without actually scoring. “When you look at the first three games, we were looking at the big picture and what we were playing for. And [Wednesday] night, we were just worried about one win. That’s what you have to do when you’re down.”
The Rangers had spoken often about luck through the first three games, and they weren’t necessarily making excuses. Both of the series-opening losses in LA were in overtime, and there were a couple of bad bounces in Game 3 at the Garden.
And it’s not like those bad breaks disappeared in Game 4, as defenseman Dan Girardi had the next wave in what seemingly has been a cursed series when the wood attachment to the butt end of his stick didn’t just break, but splintered, and allowed for Dustin Brown to race down the ice and score a goal that cut the Blueshirts’ lead to 2-1.
“I don’t know what I did wrong,” said a smiling Girardi, having been the goat of Game 1 but played admirably despite a couple of glaring gaffes. “I’m going to go home to check.”
Well, Girardi went home then boarded a plane to Los Angeles. Out here on the edge of the Pacific is where hope remains for these Blueshirts, and where they were going to chase it.
“I’ve never been so happy to have a long flight and a time change,” Girardi said.