It was approaching 10 o’clock inside the visitor’s dressing room at Staples Center — 1 in the morning back home, in New York — and Henrik Lundqvist was still outfitted in his sacred vestments, the white sweater with “RANGERS” spelled out in blue diagonally from right shoulder to left hip. He still had his red, white and blue Bauer pads swaddling his legs. A baseball cap topped his head; two hands covered his face.
Thirty-five minutes earlier a Los Angeles King named Alec Martinez had slipped a puck past him 14 minutes and 43 seconds into the second overtime of Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals, and that had clinched the championship for LA. Lundqvist had been heroic, but it hadn’t been enough, and how many times had that sentence already been written about him?
“Look at him,” Ryan McDonagh said from across the room, nodding at his goalkeeper. “He has no idea but he is Superman for us.”
Cruelly, the game had taken so long that the winning goal had come at 12:26 a.m., New York time, on June 14, 2014 — 20 years to the day that the Rangers had celebrated their previous Stanley Cup. It was one more reminder how close they had come to dancing on stars. And even in the difficult moment, Lundqvist seemed to understand what had been missed.
“You just never know,” he said.
That was as good as it ever got for Lundqvist, who set aside 48 shots that night, who had, by himself, allowed the Rangers to believe they could win that Stanley Cup. That was as close as he ever got. There would be no parade for him, no Canyon of Heroes.
But Friday night there will be a banner raised in his honor and No. 30 will take its rightful place in the rafters at Madison Square Garden among the others: 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11, 19 and 35. And it will be a reminder that in New York City, as much as we proclaim to be a strictly bottom-line town, you can capture our hearts forever even without winning a championship.
Yes: There may be a special plateau reserved for the Clyde Fraziers and the Tom Seavers, the Mark Messiers and the Joe Namaths, the Derek Jeters and the Bryan Trottiers, the Eli Mannings and the Marty Brodeurs and the Julius Ervings who do make it to the parade, who do win the rings, who do etch their names, eternally, into the city’s trophy case.
But if the fates choose a different path, you can still be a part of forever. Lundqvist found that out. There have been others. There was Patrick Ewing, whose annual quest became the city’s quest, whose perennial playoff disappointments became part of the city’s scar tissue. Ewing knew plenty how Lundqvist felt eight years ago. So many seasons had ended for him similarly, his feet in an ice bucket, his mind reluctant to peel off his No. 33 uniform for the final time of a season.
“If I had it to do over again, I’d wish for the same journey,” Ewing said a few years ago, inside the basketball office at Georgetown. “With only one difference. Once, just once, we’d have won the final game of a damned season.”
There was David Wright, who will never finish his professional life in the Hall of Fame as Ewing did, as Lundqvist will, but whose obsession to bringing a championship to the Mets mirrored Mets’ fans fixation. Like Lundqvist, the closest he came was a five-game ouster in the 2015 World Series, his last true professional hurrah.
Earlier that fall, Wright and his aching back had scored all the way from first during a big game in Washington, and as he popped up after sliding across the plate he punched the air with an unbridled joy that has become, all these years later, his signature moment as a Met. He’ll get his day at Citi Field someday, and it will feel an awful lot like Friday night at the Garden.
Similarly, exactly 20 years earlier, another New York baseball hero named Don Mattingly had been captured inside a moment of pure, unfiltered bliss. That was Oct. 1, 1995, at Toronto’s SkyDome. In the instant after Pat Kelly took a toss from Tony Fernandez to get the 27th out at second base, cinching the Yankees’ first playoff berth in 14 years, Mattingly took to a knee and pounded his fist on the turf — and a legion of Yankees fans did the same.
That would be Mattingly’s only taste of the postseason. He hit a home run a few days later against the Mariners, hit .417 against Seattle in the only 24 playoff at-bats he’d ever get. But it ended in a blurry rush, another Game 5 heartbreak, another visiting ballpark, another clubhouse crushed by defeat, swollen with emotion, Mattingly sitting in front of his locker in the Kingdome understanding what Lundqvist would soon learn: You just never know.
“I’m proud of myself,” Mattingly said quietly in the awful gloom of that crestfallen room. “I came to play every day.”
So did Wright. So did Ewing. And so did Henrik Lundqvist, who will become a permanent part of the Garden furniture Friday night, long after becoming a permanent fixture of Rangers’ fans hearts. He came to play every day, and played exceedingly well, and for that he is a part of forever. Cup or no Cup.