Culture
Lazerus: Rangers prove their championship mettle after flirting with infamy
RALEIGH, N.C. — Evgeny Kuznetsov, in his inimitable, impish way, promised “hell” for the New York Rangers if they had to come back to North Carolina for a Game 6 in this increasingly indescribable second-round series.
Oh, but this wasn’t hell. Not even with a “raise hell” theme for the night. Not even with AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” blaring before puck drop. Not even with Carolina’s notoriously loud fans reaching new heights as the Hurricanes took a two-goal lead into the third period at PNC Arena. This was nothing.
No, hell is what would have followed a potential Game 7 if the Rangers never pulled out of this tailspin in time to salvage this series. Hell would have been living with the utter failure of losing in the second round after winning the first seven games of the playoffs. Hell would have been the infamy of becoming the fifth team in Stanley Cup playoff history to blow a 3-0 series lead. Hell would have been trying to sleep while endlessly reliving Jordan Martinook’s singular, spectacular save in the second period of Game 6 when he swept Ryan Lindgren’s shot off the goal line from his belly after it had already beaten Frederik Andersen through the legs.
Hell would have been always knowing they had let a golden opportunity at winning the Rangers’ second Stanley Cup in 84 years slip through their fingers, frittering away one of the best seasons in franchise history.
“I (was) just scared thinking about that,” Artemi Panarin said.
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Panarin can admit that now. Now that the Rangers have proven their mettle. Now that Chris Kreider has etched himself into Rangers lore alongside the likes of Matteau and Messier with a natural hat trick to turn a 3-1 third-period deficit into a 5-3 Game 6 victory in front of a silenced, shell-shocked Carolina crowd. Now that the Rangers’ next game at Madison Square Garden will be against either the Florida Panthers or the Boston Bruins in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final rather than in a winner-take-all Game 7 against the never-say-die Hurricanes.
Postgame locker rooms in the NHL are never all that rowdy after series victories that don’t involve the Stanley Cup itself. The players are too tired and there’s too much work left to do. Save the champagne and the plastic wrap and the ski goggles for late June. So there wasn’t much celebration in the cramped visitors room at PNC Arena after this one. But there was a palpable sense of relief, knowing that the Rangers only flirted with infamy, rather than set a date with it.
“To be honest, I kind of felt nervous on the bench when we were a couple goals down,” said Panarin, who sometimes seems incapable of the usual wall of casual bravado that most pro athletes throw up. “And still in the third period, we were down. I was actually nervous. But we did it — thank God.”
Funny how quickly things can change.
The Rangers were dead in the water, down 3-1 and handling the puck like a hand grenade, missing the net over and over again. Then Carolina goaltender Frederik Andersen lost a Mika Zibanejad puck in his skates and Kreider whacked it in.
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The Rangers power play was lifeless, having gone nine straight chances with nary a goal, and precious few real chances. Then Kreider tipped in a rising Panarin shot and the game was tied.
The game seemed destined for overtime as both teams battened down the hatches. Then Kreider capped his hat trick and it was the Hurricanes left scrambling.
Nine minutes. Nine minutes for a 3-1 deficit to become a 4-3 lead, for Kreider to go from franchise pillar to franchise legend, for an all-time Rangers choke job to become an all-time Rangers gut-check, for an all-time Hurricanes comeback to become an all-time what-if.
“They’re a great team,” said Barclay Goodrow, who finally eased the tension with a 143-foot empty-netter with 48.1 seconds left. “It’s not like we go up 3-0 and they’re going to roll over and quit. They’re a really good team and we knew they were going to fight back. We maybe had a letdown game last game but I think throughout the season, whenever that’s happened, we’ve rebounded and came back stronger the next game.”
Doing it in the regular season is one thing. Doing it in the postseason is quite another. And now the Rangers know what they’re capable of. New York’s top two lines could have been on milk cartons the last couple of games. In Game 6, they combined for four goals and six assists over the last 35 minutes. Shesterkin found his all-world form just as Kreider did, denying Carolina captain Jordan Staal from point-blank range shortly before Kreider’s equalizer on the power play, then stoning Andrei Svechnikov unchecked from the low slot with 2:39 left, with Andersen pulled. The Rangers were tested — truly tested — for the first time, and they aced it.
The Rangers were never going to go 16-0; that simply doesn’t happen in the NHL. It’s better this way. Championship teams are forged in the fires of frustration and futility. Championship teams find a way.
On the other end of the handshake line was a team still trying to find that way. For the fourth straight season, the Hurricanes looked the part of legitimate contender. For the fourth straight season, their playoff run ended without a victory beyond the second round. There were the usual culprits, too. For all their strengths — the relentless forecheck wreaking havoc in the offensive zone, the Rod Brind’Amour-esque work ethic that leads to miraculous plays like Martinook’s save, the deep back end that allows them to control the tempo so well — the Hurricanes still didn’t get enough scoring from up top, and still didn’t get enough saves from in goal. Jake Guentzel, their big trade-deadline addition, the long-sought-after sniper, was absolutely terrific in his brief time in Carolina, but had no goals and just one assist in the last three games. Sebastian Aho got a big goal off an Andrei Svechnikov feed to make it 3-1 midway through the second, but that dynamic top line still finished the postseason having been outscored 5-4 at five-on-five.
And then there’s Andersen. Playoff Freddie (technically an unfair nickname, but Late In A Series Freddie doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue) reared his ugly head again, falling to 5-8 when facing elimination (including wins in Games 4 and 5). He made just 19 saves on 23 shots, his save percentage in elimination games falling to a paltry .897. He’s 0-4 with an .856 save percentage in Game 7s, so even had the Rangers not pulled this one out of their Broadway hat, Carolina would have had a lot to overcome on Saturday night.
It’s a familiar refrain, and a familiar pain.
“This is a tough way to end a really good year,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “These guys played their butts off all year. But this is what you’re going to remember. That’s the hard part.”
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Now the Rangers get a few days off, and they can sit back and watch the Bruins and Panthers beat up on each other for another game (preferably two). All that tension that had been weighing on them since dropping Game 4 is lifted now, but it’ll be back with a vengeance when the puck drops next. All that work and all that sweat and all that energy expended, and they’re only halfway there. That’s playoff hockey — an unrelenting, agonizing, excruciating mental and physical grind, beautiful but brutal at the same time.
A hell of sorts, you might say.
But one the Rangers now know they can handle. One they now know they can thrive in.
“We just tried not to be frustrated,” Panarin said. “That’s the playoffs. It’s up and down every time. It’s hard to do sometimes. But we did it.”
(Top photo: Grant Halverson/Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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