The Rangers. Spring hockey. I didn’t expect this, and although lately there must have been predictions that the Rangers would reach the Stanley Cup Finals, I don’t recall them. The pickers mostly favored the Canadiens, and the Penguins before them, and unhappily I did, too. Would the Rangers have won if Chris Kreider hadn’t disabled the Canadiens star goalie, Carey Price, in a crash in the first game? Hard to say. His replacement, Dustin Tokarski, played wildly, with a retro aggressive style, coming far out beyond the goal’s blue paint, the way goalies did fifteen and twenty years ago, and he played well. One of his teammates even said that he was outplaying Henrik Lundqvist, King Henrik, the Rangers’ Swedish goalie, although he wasn’t.

So how did the Rangers get to where they are? For a long time, the general manager Glen Sather’s idea has been that you put together a decent season and make the playoffs, and then it’s anyone’s chance to win, since you can’t predict injuries or bad luck or team dyspepsia. This is parity hockey. (I invite anyone disinclined to listen to a rant to join me at the next paragraph.) Parity hockey is a businessperson’s notion of sport, disingenuously sold as a gift to the fans. The idea, based on the model of the other major leagues, is that the owners rig matters in such a way that any team might win a championship, but, because of the salary cap and the draft rankings, presumably no team will dominate from season to season the way teams historically have in the N.H.L. Also, if nearly everyone is more or less even, the entrants to the playoffs aren’t decided until late in the season, so the owners guard against fans losing interest in a faltering team. The league tried to enforce parity twenty years ago, by permitting players to obstruct one another: any player who crossed a team’s defensive blue line had a stick held against his midsection in the manner of a subway turnstile. Such tactics caused the great Mario Lemieux to retire early, calling the N.H.L. “a garbage league” for permitting players to tackle him routinely. These practices were allowed because the N.H.L. had charged fifty million dollars for franchises in places that still haven’t made much of a case for having a hockey team—Phoenix and Raleigh and Miami, for example. These new owners, with rosters of young players and castoffs from other teams, said, more or less, “I bought the right to make money in your league. You have to permit tactics that allow me to have as good a chance to win as a skilled and established team has, so that I can have fans to whom I can sell food and drinks and jerseys and parking.” You get parity then. You get happy businesspeople. You get no dynasties. And you get boorish fans like me, who remember the Islanders winning four Stanley Cups in a row and who won’t be happy until the Rangers have five.

Sather believes in magic men, which makes sense since he grew up as a coach and a general manager with one of the most magical of teams, the Edmonton Oilers, who had history’s chief magic man, Wayne Gretzky. Sather has tried persistently to bring magic men to New York, and sometimes has. More often, he has failed embarrassingly. Sather is best at trading, and his best trade may have been sending the woeful Scott Gomez, and the wicked contract Sather gave him, to Montreal for the young defenseman Ryan McDonagh, who has developed so handsomely that my favorite local sportswriter, Rick Carpiniello, of the Journal News, calls him Ryan McMonster. Two years ago, the Rangers had an admirable collection of young players. They weren’t roughnecks, exactly, but they were committed, and often teams found it challenging to match their intensity. Sather traded away a central figure on that team, Brandon Dubinsky, with others, for Rick Nash, a scoring star who scores mainly only in the regular season. He seemed to revive himself (slightly) in this series, though, and scored three goals. A few months ago, Sather traded away the team’s captain, Ryan Callahan, for Martin St. Louis, a thirty-eight-year-old player who won the scoring championship in last year’s abbreviated season. These trades, and the draft picks that went with them, are important because they make us Rangers followers realize, This year is probably all we’ll have. The Rangers did not choose in the draft last year until the third round, and Sather has given away his first-round picks for the next two years. There isn’t any help coming from the minors, either. There are thirty teams in the N.H.L., and the Hockey News ranked the Rangers prospects dead last. I’m wondering how Sather will even find enough players to fill the roster for his A.H.L. team. He seems to think he will sign undrafted free agents. He’s lately signed two, both of whom seem destined for peripheral N.H.L. roles, if they make the N.H.L. at all.

Some impressions: The Rangers began the season dreadfully, at 2-6, but they got much better. Now they seem to be playing at the best edge of their capabilities. Crafty and diminutive winger Mats Zuccarello, the only active N.H.L. player from Norway, had a fine season. So did Lundqvist, eventually. Surely, though, some of the credit belongs to the first-year coach, Alain Vigneault. How much coaching has to do with success in the N.H.L. is difficult to determine, and coaches always say that it’s the players who play the game. Of course, this is true, but what coaches give players are plans for attack and defense and how to blend the two. Once the players have absorbed the system, coaches manage them, determining who will play and how much time they’ll get, and raising the players’ confidence when they can. Vigneault seems to have invigorated the Rangers and given them a purpose they didn’t seem to have when they started the season.

It is a relief not to have to go back to Montreal. It’s an annoying house for visitors. The fans seem to think that a Canadiens player simply having the puck and moving toward the other team’s end is a reason to cheer wildly. And that “Olé” song is as obnoxious as the chant of those zealots at the Garden who persist in razzing Denis Potvin. Ben McGrath told me that the song comes from European soccer and has spread into American high-school football. He calls it a sonic weed.

My patience wore out on the splendid P. K. Subban, the Canadiens defenseman, who dove repeatedly. Why the league allowed it, I have no idea. In the fifth game, a Ranger named Benoît Pouliot skated over to Subban, who fell down as if his feet had been kicked from beneath him, impersonating a reviled gesture called slew-footing. The replays showed clearly that Pouliot’s feet had not touched Subban, nor had he tripped him. The Canadiens scored on the power play they were given. In an earlier game, Subban, having been grazed slightly on the jaw with a stick, lifted his knees like a figure skater and fell to the ice. I don’t mind at all that he’s gone.