Rangers’ last bit of hope lasted just 21 seconds

TAMPA, Fla. — For a fleeting moment, the Rangers had hope.

To be exact, for 21 seconds.

Frank Vatrano had just broken through with a power play goal to — against all conceivable logic — tie up Saturday’s game. The Rangers had been thoroughly outplayed by the Lightning. They were only in the game because of Igor Shesterkin’s brilliance. They looked tired and battered and broken and every bit like their season was going to end.

And in the space of one shot by Vatrano, all of that changed.

This was suddenly the same movie the Rangers had directed all postseason. The one where they win an elimination game they have little business winning. The one where Shesterkin gives them some magic, a puck sneaks by Andrei Vasilevskiy and the Rangers find themselves going back to New York a game away from the Stanley Cup Final.

It defied any reasonable analysis of hockey that the game was tied. But it fit right in with any conception of this team.

And for 21 seconds, the Rangers believed.

“Make it 1-1 late in the third, you’re obviously thinking you got a shot,” Adam Fox said later. “Like you said, we’ve done it before.”

But this time, the movie had a different ending.

“This time,” Fox said, “we weren’t able to finish it off.”

The hard lesson of this Eastern Conference finals defeat for the Rangers is that the Lightning are simply on another level. And they learned it one last time on Saturday.

Because while they were still riding the high from Vatrano’s goal, Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov were breaking up the ice. And before the Amalie Arena crowd could be properly deflated, Stamkos jolted it back into life, beating Shesterkin and handing a 2-1 lead back to the Lightning.

“I don’t know what happened,” Rangers coach Gerard Gallant said. “They got a goal. We battled hard, come back and tie the game on our power play goal. They come down and get a two-on-one and put it in the net.”

It was a swift, cold slap in the face. The Rangers’ resilience only could get them so far. Shesterkin only could get them so far. There would be no happy ending here. Only a dead tired group of players in a handshake line, trying to swat away reality.

“We battled there at the end and tied it,” Fox said. “But just didn’t get this one.”

For the last 40 days, the Rangers have been walking along a cliff’s edge and managing to stay upright, no matter what.

For 21 seconds, it looked like they just might somehow do so again.

But finally, they fell over.