And so it ends.

It ends for the 2016-17 Rangers with Tuesday’s second-round, Game 6, 4-2 defeat to Ottawa at the Garden through which, almost unforgivably, the Senators were the ones to exhibit the desperation of a team facing elimination.

It ends for this group that exceeded expectations throughout a 102-point regular season and the six-game, first-round victory over the Canadiens but did not live up to them against Ottawa, and not by a long shot.

It ends with a thud.

Ends with a dud.

And as this 22nd straight season without a Stanley Cup championship ends, this least defensible playoff series defeat of the Henrik Lundqvist Era all but certainly will mark the end of the core group featuring the King, Dan Girardi, Marc Staal, Ryan McDonagh, Derek Stepan that has been intact since midway through 2010-11 and was augmented by Chris Kreider, Rick Nash and Mats Zuccarello by 2012-13.

Changes will be made.

Everything will be on the table.

Because while the Rangers have won nine playoff series and 46 post-season games over the run that began in 2012 and produced that one 2014 trip to the Cup final that seems long ago, this group could never win it all for the franchise that has raised the chalice only once since 1940.

Four decades later, it is Ed Giacomin, Brad Park, Rod Gilbert, Jean Ratelle, Vic Hadfield, Walt Tkaczuk and Billy Fairbairn all over again.

Good. Very good.

But not quite good enough.

And as this second-round performance wasn’t good enough, general manager Jeff Gorton necessarily will be aggressive in attempting to change the dynamic.

Because same old, same old won’t cut it again.

“It’s disappointing when you have a team this good and an opportunity like this,” said Rick Nash, obviously impaired through this series. “We couldn’t close out games. They got the job done.”

The experience factor on which the Rangers subliminally leaned was worthless in this series and in this game. The Senators indeed earned this victory, but the Rangers certainly were co-conspirators in their own demise.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever gone through a series like this where we seemed to shoot ourselves in the foot as far as closing out games or not playing well in crucial situations,” said Ryan McDonagh, who curiously suffered through his third straight subpar performance.

“We have nobody to blame but ourselves and that’s the truth of the situation.”

This was a could have, should have series for the Blueshirts, who had held the lead for 179 minutes 46 seconds through the first five games and had trailed for only 13:10. But the Rangers yielded a Game 1, tie-breaking winner at 15:49 of the third period before yielding tying goals late in Games 2 and 5 after the Senators had pulled goaltender Craig Anderson before losing both matches in overtime.

“We had some games we should have won,” Mats Zuccarello said. “We gave them away.”

If the Rangers gave this one away, they did so when they were stuck in the gate while the Senators burst to a 2-0 lead by the 14:44 mark of the first period. It took 40 minutes for the Rangers to make a push and when they did, it wasn’t enough. Chris Kreider, who scored off a blazing rush up the middle to bring the Blueshirts within 3-2 less than a minute into the third, was dominant in the final period, but what took so long?

And No. 20 was not alone in appearing as AWOL through 40 minutes as Matt Harvey was on Saturday at the ballpark in Queens. He had plenty of company. Plenty.

The Rangers’ structure did not hold. The team with all the experience — 1,000-plus games of aggregate tournament experience — did not meet the moment as well as its less accomplished opponents. If it wasn’t the most splendid Erik Karlsson taking over for shifts at a time, it was Jean-Gabriel Pageau scoring four goals in Game 2 or it was Derick Brassard morphing into Big Game Brass with his Game 5 tying score.

It was pretty much everyone falling short for New York.

And it was the Rangers’ season coming to an end.

If not an era.