RALEIGH, N.C. — It’s been 16 years since any NHL team has done it.
And it’s been — you guessed it — 30 years since the last Rangers team did it.
It’s nothing new for this Blueshirts team, which churned out its seventh consecutive victory of the playoffs with a 3-2 win in overtime over the Hurricanes in Game 3 Thursday night at PNC Arena, where the home team will now have to fight to keep its season alive and avoid getting swept in a playoff round for a second straight year.
One game after the other, the Rangers have chewed through this postseason so far.
It was Artemi Panarin who showed teeth this time around in overtime, scoring 1:43 into the extra period by chipping a backhanded pass from Vincent Trocheck between his legs and in before extending just one leg — perhaps higher than he ever has — in his signature celebratory kick.
“Bread spoke up in the locker room and then spoke up on the ice,” Trocheck quipped after putting up two assists in the victory, extending his point streak to seven straight games.
This was a win that required heart from a team whose heart was in it from the beginning for a special reason.
As goalie Igor Shesterkin led the Rangers out for warm-ups, there, right behind him, was Filip Chytil.
The Czech center stepped onto the ice under the white hues of the arena lights to compete in his first game since suffering what was believed to be the fourth documented concussion of his seven-year NHL career.
“Never felt better when somebody hit me or I hit somebody,” Chytil said with a smile that never left his face for his entire postgame interview. “I even got a stick to the face at one point and I was like, ‘Yeah, give me more.’ ”
After coming up big in the previous game, the 2020 first overall pick, once considered a bust, snapped his third goal in two contests past Carolina goalie Pyotr Kochetkov — who relieved Frederik Andersen of his duties — to break a 1-1 tie in third period and give the Rangers their first lead of the night.
The fans clad in red seeped into the red stadium chairs, but they soared right up again once Andrei Svechnikov netted the equalizer during a six-on-five advantage with 1:36 left in regulation.
“I’ll be honest I was really confident, just in the way we were playing the game,” Rangers head coach Peter Laviolette said. “It was tough the way that that ended, but it shouldn’t be a reflection of how you kind of got better as the game went on. That was the message going back out there [for OT]. This is a resilient group and they’ve been in these situations before.”
After getting outworked in the first period, the Rangers played a much more competitive middle frame and managed to knot the score at one-all going into the second intermission.
Laviolette wanted his team to do a better job of staying out of the penalty box, but the Rangers found themselves shorthanded three times in the second period.
Special teams, however, continue to swing in the Rangers favor in a major way.
The Blueshirts’ offensive-minded penalty killers capitalized for the third time this postseason.
Mika Zibanejad made a nifty one-touch play to get the puck out of the Rangers’ zone and race up ice before dishing to a streaking Chris Kreider, who backhanded the feed five-hole on Kochetkov to even the score up 1-1.
That gave the Rangers’ fans in attendance some gusto, as they started a hearty “Let’s Go Rangers!” chant.
“I think we did a good job with our pressure,” said Kreider, who scored his third shorthanded goal of the postseason. “On the other hand, I thought they did a good job with their pressure, too. I think there’s some things we’d like to do a little bit better on our power play to take advantage of some of our chances.”
