Stanley Cup Game 4: Rangers clutch last chance to keep Kings at bay

So, we’ll go another.

After dropping three straight games to the Los Angeles Kings, including one on home ice at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, on Wednesday night the New York Rangers took one. The Rangers finally managed to hold a lead, and sent the series back to LA for Game 5 with a 2-1 win.

When we last met in this space we were talking about luck, and whether the Kings had a lot of it. The alternative theory, expressed by some of you in the comments, was that it was less about luck for LA than it was about being – as one of you noted – “clutch”.

Never was there a better time to be clutch than Wednesday night. So what happened? It’s not like LA didn’t try, but there was something about the Rangers, wasn’t there? What was it?

In a familiar scenario, New York grabbed the lead first, on a goal from Benoît Pouliot at just over seven minutes into the first period.

Familiar, of course, because this was effectively the script in the first two games – both of which the Rangers ended up losing. But on Wednesday they were better than the teams that showed up earlier in this series.

The Rangers were fleet of foot and physical. They hit the Kings, drove the LA net and got bodies in front of the puck when it was aimed at theirs. In short, they did all the things early on you might expect from a team less than 60 minutes away from watching the Stanley Cup awarded to someone else in their house.

Second? They finally caught a break. It looked like this:

In games one through three, that’s an LA goal. Wednesday night? Everything was different.

The game moved on and the scoreboard stayed the same until six-and-a-half minutes into the second, when the Rangers doubled their lead. Martin St Louis fired a wrist shot past Jonathan Quick to make it 2-0:

The Kings did strike back – this time care of captain Dustin Brown, only a couple of minutes after New York’s goal. And yet, after that, there was nothing. That is to say, there was plenty of action back and forth – including an LA power play on which they failed to capitalize – but no further scoring. The script, as it had been written in Games 1 and 2, was changed.

Then came the third. And with the Rangers holding that one-goal lead late in the third, this happened:

It was a moment worth of all caps, and Fox Sports Live’s Twitter account obliged us.

— FOX Sports Live (@FOXSportsLive) June 12, 2014

YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS UP. THAT. CLOSE. #BecauseItsTheCup pic.twitter.com/Cfru4SCbSI

And that was that, really. An unbelievable win? Perhaps not. A surprising one? Undoubtedly yes.

The Rangers were embarrassingly out-shot, 41 to 19 (meaning they owe a lot – or even more than that – to goalie Henrik Lundqvist), and out-drawn on face-offs an equally dismal 41 to 24. The Rangers gave the puck up three more times than the Kings did (10 to 7) and failed to score on any of their three power plays. Yet they survived.

It was an odd thing, watching the game from Canada, where the palpable sense of doom and subsequent survival instinct on the ice at MSG seemed to be reflected in the broadcast emanating from the Hockey Night in Canada team at the CBC, which is set to hand over the reins to the Rogers media conglomerate as part of that blockbuster rights deal signed back in November.

Starting with the opening highlight montage Wednesday night, set to Pearl Jam’s Alive, you got the feeling we weren’t just talking about the Rangers. There has been a sense of anomie in the CBC’s broadcasts during these playoffs, and on Wednesday it seemed to have finally morphed into full-blown nihilism. How else do we explain a Don Cherry dance number, except to assume every decision maker that okayed it along the line was filled with either total despair or a foreboding sense of pointlessness? .

It was like watching a hockey broadcast from the end of the world.

But we’ll get at least one more. The Rangers have kept oblivion at bay, and will try to do it again on Friday night at 8pm ET.