This low roar would start in one section or another at Madison Square Garden, the sounds of feet stamping and hands clapping and voices bellowing, and as the chants spread and spread it felt like the old building was quaking: HEN-reek, HEN-reek.

Down on the ice, Henrik Lundqvist had just stopped a breakaway or saved a puck with his head or completed a shutout — or, he had just been tending goal, game after game, a source of constant comfort at a position that bedeviled other franchises but not, for the better part of 15 years, the Rangers.