The Stanley Cup Playoffs are starting to wind down, which means it’s the time of the year when Rangers fans have little else to do — in their official duties as Rangers fans, at least — besides mark the various anniversaries of the greatest season of hockey they’ve ever watched, and ever will watch. Today, for example, is the seventeenth anniversary of Mark Messier’s hat trick against the Devils, and Friday is the anniversary of “Matteau, Matteau, Matteau.” It’s not lost on us that this is all a little depressing — re-living a series of events that happened way back in the early months of the first Giuliani term. But the Rangers haven’t gotten past the second round in fourteen years. This year’s team was plenty likable, but that doesn’t change the fact that Rangers fans haven’t had much to celebrate this millennium.
In any case, it’s hard not to think of the 1994 today, now that the Canucks — the Western Conference champions that year — have made it back to the Stanley Cup Finals. And they did so in bizarre fashion:
The Canucks Made It Back to the Finals Before the Rangers Did