Chris Kreider of the New York Rangers celebrates his goal...

Chris Kreider of the New York Rangers celebrates his goal against the Pittsburgh Penguins with teammate Mika Zibanejad and Jacob Trouba Game 1 of the First Round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday, May 3, 2022. Credit: Jim McIsaac

That Game 1 epic between the Penguins and Rangers was a reminder — if we really needed one — that there is nothing in sports quite like overtime playoff hockey.

And triple overtime is three times as good!

But there was another useful reminder in the aftermath of the Penguins’ 4-3 victory as the teams head into Game 2 at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night.

It was that no matter how much of a happy surprise a team’s regular season is, losing in the playoffs stinks, and no amount of big-picture rationalizing can change that.

This is where emotionally detached journalists sometimes lose track of the reality that coaches, players and fans understand: There are no guarantees in life or in hockey, so win it while you can.

Hence the Rangers facing a sort-of-must-win on Thursday night, a vibe made more acute by the game being played in front of energized, demanding Garden fans — and by facing the Penguins’ third-string goalie.

About Louis Domingue: To the Rangers and their fans, he represents nothing more than an opportunity, this French-Canadian, lefthanded goalie no one had heard of before, who at 30 years old has played for six NHL teams.

But in Pittsburgh, overnight he became exactly the sort of folk hero the playoffs are uniquely suited to create.

After he entered Game 1 midway through the second overtime and saved 17 Rangers shots, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter spent Wednesday finding and sampling the “spicy pork and broccoli” dish Domingue ate after the first overtime.

He found it at a Manhattan eatery called “The Little Beet.” (His review was less negative than Domingue’s was.)

Another Post-Gazette story fleshed out Domingue’s larger life story, complete with his interests in tarantulas and cooking. His father is a documentary filmmaker. His mother is an art teacher.


But the point here is the playoffs are their own thing, and the fact that Domingue appeared in two games in the regular season was irrelevant as he prepared to play in his second game in the playoffs.

Assuming the Rangers do not win the Stanley Cup, will the postmortems on their season be largely positive, with an eye on better things to come in 2022-23?

Absolutely. It is a fact that they are ahead of schedule and one of the youngest teams in the league, while the Penguins are relative geezers trying to squeeze one more Cup run out of their aging core.

But again: No guarantees. Next season could bring injuries or bad breaks or . . . heck, just ask the 2021-22 Islanders about complications.

They were the ones who were supposed to be the Cup contenders this season, not the Rangers. Then everything went wrong.

Several decades ago, when I was in my first season on the St. John’s basketball beat, the Johnnies shocked No. 1 seed Ohio State to reach the Elite Eight.

St. John’s lost to eventual national champion Duke, 78-61, after which I made the mistake of wondering aloud why coach Lou Carnesecca seemed so upset about the loss. After all, hadn’t St. John’s overachieved simply by getting that far?

Let’s just say he disagreed, and that he was right.

St. John’s has been to the Elite Eight only once since then, and not at all in this century. It last reached the Final Four in 1985, the national championship game in 1952 and the NCAA championship podium in . . . well, never.

Stuff happens.

Hockey’s playoffs are notoriously unpredictable, with good reason. So while the survivor of the Rangers-Penguins series will be the underdog in the second round if it faces the Hurricanes, it should shock no one if that series does not go as expected.

That’s why the stakes for the Rangers are higher than they might appear at first glance. Remember: You play to win the game.

Did the Rangers have a great, surprising, exciting, ahead-of-schedule, joyride of a regular season? Sure did!

Does that matter on Thursday night? It does not.

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