It’s easy to view the Rangers ride through the early portion of these Stanley Cup playoffs as smooth and without a lot of bumps in the road.
And it’s an easy trap to daydream that life will continue this way.
After all, entering Tuesday night’s Game 2 second-round matchup with the Hurricanes at the Garden, the Rangers had won each of their first five games of the 16 postseason wins required to hoist the Stanley Cup.
Their four-game sweep of an offensively challenged Washington Capitals team in the first round was never truly in doubt. And, in the Game 1 second-round win over Carolina on Sunday at the Garden, they led 3-1 after the first period and had control of the game throughout.
So, for the dreamers amongst Rangers fans, there had to be some visions of the team mowing through these playoffs without much resistance dancing in your heads.
But no team in NHL history has gone 16-0 in the postseason en route to winning a Stanley Cup.
And, even if the Rangers are good enough (and fortunate enough) to end their 30-year drought without a Cup, they’re not going to win 16 in a row to get there.
Adversity lurks.
It lurks on the next shift, in the next game, in the next series, if there is another series. It’s bound to be there. Nothing that’s as difficult to win as the Stanley Cup comes easily.
The Rangers, of course, know this and they appear to have a team that’s built to handle it, with key veterans on the roster who are led by a veteran coach in Peter Laviolette, who’s been there and done all of that.
When the Rangers hung on in Sunday’s win after a mad Carolina rush with a late six-on-five goal to tighten the final score, a walk through their dressing room after the game felt like they’d just won a midweek regular-season game in December.
The mood was matter-of-fact. There was zero sense that anything major had been accomplished.
In one corner of the room, Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin, one of the consistent rocks on the team, was telling reporters he needed to be better. Same as he had after yielding just seven goals in four games in the sweep of Washington.
Other players inside that dressing room spoke in hushed tones about moving on to the next game and the need to get better, deflecting praise.
Laviolette, after that game, talked about how the “hair on the skin’’ of the team that lost — Carolina — would be “raised” for Game 2 and that his team needed to be prepared to match that intensity.
The Rangers have a number of veterans on this team who were part of the opening-round playoff loss to the Devils last postseason when the team had much higher expectations. That has steeled their focus and kept them businesslike — even after big playoff wins.
“Guys have been talking about it not only throughout the playoffs but throughout the year,” Rangers star Mika Zibanejad, who scored two first-period goals in Game 1, said before Tuesday’s Game 2. “We’ve been trying to build something for this time of year. Adversity is going to come throughout this series, and I think we’ve been able to handle adversity throughout the regular season. That taught us a lot about ourselves, and it’s something we feel good about.
“Throughout this last two weeks [of playoff hockey], it’s been focused on the game we have at hand. We don’t look much further than that.”
The Rangers’ mantra in these playoffs — beginning with Laviolette and permeating throughout every corner of the dressing room — has been to keep doing what worked so well during the regular season, in which they won the Presidents’ Trophy as the best team in the league.
“Adversity is going to happen, but I think we’re a team that knows what to expect and we know what to do when adversity happens — and that’s to keep working, keep our heads down and keep going,” Rangers defenseman Braden Schneider told The Post before Game 2. “We’ve done a good job of that all year. We’ve been down in games and worked back and we find a way. It’s just something that we’ve ingrained in ourselves not to quit and to keep working.”
What has allowed this team to be so unaffected by highs and lows?
“We have a lot of veteran guys and that kind of rubs off on the younger guys like myself,” rookie winger Will Cuylle told The Post. “In terms of being a pretty mature team, we stay level-headed with no high too high and no low too low. When we go through some adversity, we’re a pretty tight group and that’s that’ll help us going down the stretch.”
It’s a stretch the Rangers, of course, hope is a long one — a stretch that includes 11 more wins, including Tuesday night.
