These words, uttered in the aftermath of the 2001 trade that brought Eric Lindros to New York, were the ones Glen Sather lived by throughout a pro hockey lifetime that began when the NHL was still a mom-and-pop Original Six operation:

“It’s better to be a lion for one day than it is to be a mouse for life,” Sather said then, addressing the high-risk nature of the trade for No. 88, and he might just as well have said the very same thing when he traded for Pavel Bure or Rick Nash or Martin St. Louis or Keith Yandle, or when he signed Bobby Holik, Wade Redden or Brad Richards, or when he hired, then fired coach John Tortorella.

You know for whom playing it safe really equated with death? Sather, that’s who. Sather, who went for it when the going was good, as it most certainly has been for the last four seasons, over which the Rangers have been the NHL’s third-best team — advancing to the conference finals three times, and the Cup final once while finishing with the East’s best record twice and capturing one Presidents’ Trophy.

It’s been kind of the Silver Age of Rangers hockey, only without the precious silver chalice.

The Last Lion of Winter made it official Wednesday, relinquishing the post of general manager of the Rangers he had held since June 2000, naming lead assistant Jeff Gorton as successor while retaining his role as club president.

And though Sather had been the Rangers’ GM for 15 years, he had been an NHL GM since 1980, when he took over the role for the Oilers following their first season in the league. Five Cups later, he would replace Neil Smith on Broadway, where, much to his chagrin, winning wasn’t simply a function of opening the checkbook, as he once had suggested from afar.

But Sather had vision made for New York. He breathed big and he dealt in marquee names. He believed in Jaromír Jágr when no one else did and built the entertaining teams that came out of the 2004-05 season around No. 68 and a Swedish goaltender named Henrik Lundqvist.

He had room for Sean Avery (twice) and, we can tell you this today, personally would have made room for Avery a third time, early in 2013-14, when No. 16 briefly flirted with returning to hockey. He would have brought him back even after it had all gone so bad at the end in Hartford the second time, even after Avery had filed a grievance against Sather and the Rangers.

He would have brought him back if head coach Alain Vigneault had thought Avery could have helped, which he did not.

Because, really, that’s all it was about for Sather. Not about grudges, never about that, but instead and exclusively about making necessary moves to win and thereby paying off in full on the lifetime contract under which he worked compatibly for Garden owner Jim Dolan.

He reached for the stars in New York and he reached for the sky and he came up just a little bit short, but never for a lack of imagination.

No Cowardly Lion he.

“The clock ticks for everyone,” said Mr. President, who turns 72 in September. “You look at the managers in the NHL, they’re all getting younger, not getting older. So I think the relationships managers have to have with one another makes it a lot easier for Jeff to be involved than to have me involved.

“I think everyone would like to retire as a champ, but it didn’t happen.”

Gorton, 47, has been Sather’s lead assistant GM for four years, joining the organization four years before that after 15 seasons with the Bruins, the last seven of which he was assistant GM. He served as interim GM between the tenures of Mike O’Connell and Peter Chiarelli, engineering the trade with Toronto in which the B’s got Tuukka Rask in exchange for Andrew Raycroft — a Boston equivalent to Scott Gomez for Ryan McDonagh.

Sather made all of the final calls within the operation — the vote could go 7-1 against, and the “one” would carry the day if cast by Sather — so there is little to go by on what to expect from Gorton, who inherits a team that seemingly could go either way, an organization that isn’t exactly flowing with NHL-ready prospects, and with extremely limited cap space in which to maneuver.

The style will be different, because everyone’s style is different and different than Sather’s, but substance will define Gorton, who will be in complete charge of the operation.

“We want a skilled team, a highly competitive team,” the new general manager said. “If we’re in a situation where he have a chance to go for it, we’re going to continue to do that.

“We want to win here.”

Gorton will put his own stamp on the organization, and probably sooner rather than later. But for now and for the immediate future, these are Sather’s Rangers, which isn’t such a bad place from which to begin as the Last Lion of Winter exits from the Broadway stage.