My initial reaction to the Magic Moment thought was to remember, quite possibly, my first Ranger magic moment. It happened on April 15, 1986. John Vanbiesbrouck scooped up a dump-in by the Flyers, held it a moment, then jumped in the air.
The Rangers, who had squeaked into the playoffs, who had been swept out of the playoffs a year before, who had little team chemistry, who had been given little chance of taking one game from the Philadelphia Flyers, won the best-of-five series three games to two. Beezer's little jump capped off Game Five, a 5-2 Ranger win that had seen the Blueshirts score two empty-net goals in the final 40 seconds to seal the victory.
The Rangers, whom the Hockey News had rated either 15th or 16th (if it was 16th, it was only because they had rated 17 teams) among playoff teams before the postseason began, had upset the Flyers, who had swept the Blueshirts the year before, who were the defending Prince of Wales Trophy winners, who some predicted would win the Stanley Cup in 1986. The Flyers, upset by the Smurfs.
I was 11 years old in 1986, only a hockey neophyte. I didn't know anything about line combinations, defensive pairings, the keys to an effective forecheck--all I knew was putting the puck in the net, and winning games. We [as of course I called the Rangers then, as I still do too often now] didn't do enough of either in 1985-86. But they managed to clinch a playoff spot late in the season in Landover. They tied the Capitals, and thus avoided a potential "play-in" game to end the season against Mario Lemieux's Penguins.
Then it was off to the Spectrum. They won Game One, 6-2, a stunningly decisive win. The Flyers took Game Two, 2-1, but Vanbiesbrouck, who had already been voted the winner of the Vezina Trophy, made 42 saves, kept the Rangers in the game, and made you wonder--maybe this was possible, after all.
The scene shifted to the Garden, and the Rangers took Game Three. But Game Four was a debacle--Peter Zezel gets the hat trick, the Post runs some nasty pictures of Zezel scoring and celebrating, the Flyers win 7-1 with seven unanswered goals in the last 45 minutes of the game.
Which brought up Game Five. It was 1-1 nine minutes into the second. But Willie Huber and Mark Osborne, of all people, scored 1:11 apart. 3-1 in enemy territory.
Brad McCrimmon scored 11:36 into the third, making it a nail-biter the rest of the way. But then it was Kelly Miller and Donny Maloney into a net vacated by soon-to-be-Ranger Bob Froese. And 17 seconds after Maloney's empty-netter, John Vanbiesbrouck scooped up that puck, hopped into the air, and began the celebration of one of the bigger upsets in recent NHL history.
And then they got the Caps, the third-best team in the league, another strong team. But they beat them too. Brian MacLellan netted an overtime goal in Game One at the Capital Center to give Broadway a lead. The Caps took the next two games, but Bobby Brooke, the best shortstop the Rangers ever had (he played behind Ron Darling at Yale), capped a wild 6-5 shootout with an overtime goal of his own. The Rangers won 4-2 in Landover, then returned home to nip the Capitals. Pierre Larouche--who had been banished to the minors at the beginning of the season by new coach Ted Sator, who thought the immensely-talented Larouche wasn't a complete enough player--scored two goals, and though Bobby Carpenter scored to make it 2-1, the Caps would not get the equalizer.
And the Rangers were the Patrick Division Playoff Champions.
Okay, they got outhit, outchecked, and outclassed by a Montreal team that went on to win the Cup. I won't even bring up the fact that Game Three of that series was won when James Patrick got tied up by a linesman, allowing a Canadien two-on-none. This was a team that was given up for dead in early April, only to beat two of the three best teams in the league in three weeks.
When the Rangers finally won the Stanley Cup in 1994, I put down into words some of my reactions to each Ranger team I remembered. 1994's entry was too gushy; 1993's entry was too nasty. But 1986's was heartfelt. ''You were my first,'' I wrote. ''You taught me what chasing the Impossible Dream was all about. You taught me to be at least a bit of an optimist, even when it made no sense to be. You taught me to believe.''
All right, it's a little gushy, but it's true. There was no reason to believe that team could do anything, but with typical little-kid innocence, I firmly believed it was our God-given right, responsibility and duty to march on through the playoffs--basically, I didn't know any better. But the thing was, they went out and did it. I still don't know how, but they did. Before I really knew anything about hockey, before I knew why there was no way we could beat the Flyers, I just thought we would. And, well, there's just no feeling like winning, to use the cliche.
So it became all about the belief, the hope, the fervent desire to see a victory in the postseason, which made the believing and the hope all the more satisfying in 1994. But it all dated back to the first impossibility, on April 15, 1986, when John Vanbiesbrouck hopped off the Spectrum ice, a moment that is still so etched in my mind that this past week I've been practically obsessing over my memory of this team, spending a night in the Microform room at the library here at school, poring over New York Post game stories and box scores. Even 11 years later, that was truly one of my magic moments.
The '86 Rangers' playoff scoreboard