The Rangers have been here before, and that is the scary part.
They held a 2-0 series lead against the Devils a year ago before the stars disappeared, Akira Schmid turned into a modern-day Martin Brodeur and the Rangers were left holding the bag.
They held a 2-0 series lead and a 2-0 Game 3 lead against Tampa two years ago before sheer exhaustion caught up with the Rangers, who scored just one goal at even strength for the rest of the series.
These Rangers have spent the year building themselves up to be different.
They built up credit by winning the Presidents’ Trophy in the regular season, sweeping the first seven games of the playoffs and by the sterling practice habits and culture brought in by Peter Laviolette.
Whether or not they really are different will be answered by whether the Rangers can close out the Hurricanes after a disastrous Game 5 on Monday night sent the series back to Raleigh, N.C., with momentum decisively in favor of the team now down 3-2.
“Desperation’s a funny thing. You can’t give it to somebody,” Laviolette said on a conference call Tuesday. “You actually have to feel it and you have to be in it. Then you can rise to that level. And so we move into the next game and you realize now that the window’s a little bit smaller and that desperation level rises.
“But there’s always conversations that we have with the team to be ready, whether they’re motivational or they’re instructional or they’re systematic, whatever they might be. And we’ve got two days to get things squared away here.”
Desperation was something of which the Rangers had next to nothing on Monday, something Laviolette tacitly acknowledged both there and immediately after the game, and which Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour pretty much said outright.
“You could tell that with the momentum shift in that game, but I also think human nature kicks in,” Brind’Amour said Tuesday. “They got a big lead in the series. It’s kinda like, ‘OK, we have another game.’ And we didn’t. So there’s just a little different mindset at that point when you get ahead, when it flips.”
Human nature now, for the Rangers, would be to start replaying the last two seasons — something they have done a good job of washing from their memories all year.
Laviolette said they are looking at lineup changes for Game 6, though surely the biggest potential shift comes down to something the coaching staff cannot control: Filip Chytil’s health.
The Rangers coach seemed to view Monday’s inexplicable performance — in which his team looked unconnected on the power play and produced just one high-danger chance at five-on-five in the final 40 minutes of regulation — as an aberration.
The word “reset” was used often.
“I think there’s always pieces that you can learn from, whether there are some good things that you did, some things you need to do better,” Laviolette said. “Maybe you’re referencing previous games, maybe it is meetings, maybe it is throwing [the tape] in the basket and moving on. The rest and the reset, the reset’s going on in here as well as to what we can do better and we’ll take care of that with the guys.”
Whatever the lineup looks like on Thursday night, the onus will be on the same stars whose production has tailed off in each of the last two postseasons, and who almost uniformly played an excellent first seven games of this postseason and before putting in anonymous performances in Games 4 and 5.
This is the crossroads for which the Rangers have spent the last 365 days building themselves up, with the worst kind of history on one side and the conference finals on the other.
If that effort has been successful, now is the time to show it.