Henrik Lundqvist reaches milestone in Rangers victory

It’s kind of just the way it has gone, and the way it will continue to go for these Rangers — up and down, with the occasional crest and the occasional crash.

Yet there is some stability back in their world with a second straight win, the latest a 4-3 victory over the Blackhawks on Thursday night at the Garden.

Maybe it was continuing to feast on the soft underbelly of the schedule, with the 30th-overall Blackhawks following Tuesday’s drubbing of the Hurricanes, a perennial Broadway patsy. But being able to move past Sunday’s debacle in Columbus — a 7-5 loss that was the low point of the season thus far — is something the club has been longing to do, and now has done.

And with it, Henrik Lundqvist collected career win No. 445, tying him with Terry Sawchuk for sixth on the all-time wins list.

“I think it’s going to be a lot of moments throughout the year when you learn,” said Lundqvist, who trails Curtis Joseph by nine wins for fifth place. “Especially when you have a lot of young guys, they have to go through it sometimes. It’s not enough to just talk about things, you have to experience it. We had our good runs here and there, for the right reasons. We just have to stick with that. That is sometimes really hard, to do the same things over and over again. But that’s what we have to do to have success.”

The Rangers (20-20-7) are looking at Saturday night’s game in Boston as a possible feel-good moment heading into the nine-day break that includes their bye week and All-Star weekend.

“We haven’t talked about it yet because we wanted to make sure we focused on Chicago,” coach David Quinn said. “But, boy, it’s a great opportunity to go into that break being over .500, beating a really good team in Boston, feeling good about yourselves. You’re going to live with that game for nine days.

“Listen, we went through a tough stretch and we started to dig ourselves out of a hole. That’s a big game for us in a lot of ways.”

So maybe the Rangers can see light from this hole, dug with the five-game losing streak that preceded a 2-1 win in Brooklyn this past Saturday, concluding a run of just five wins in 19 games since Thanksgiving. But since that game, they have won two out of three — the one loss a putrid effort versus the Blue jackets that Quinn called “just ridiculous” and “a joke.”

“I don’t want to make too much of that game because I thought we were doing good things leading up to that,” Quinn said. “It was back-to-back and we beat the Islanders [the night before], so who knows, human nature is a funny thing. But I like the way we responded since then.”

What Quinn didn’t like was the way they came out against the Blackhawks (16-24-9), slow and sloppy and going down 1-0 on a tally from Brandon Saad, the first of two power-play goals against. But that might have awakened the Rangers, who then scored three in a row from Filip Chytil, Mats Zuccarello and Chris Kreider — with another from Mika Zibanejad that came off the board due to a missed offside that was challenged and won by young Chicago coach Jeremy Colliton.

The Blackhawks made it interesting with an Alex DeBrincat power-play goal at 1:40 of the third period to make it 3-2, but Zibanejad got an empty-netter before Dominik Kahun scored with 1.5 seconds left to only anger Lundqvist and not affect the outcome.
Nevertheless, Lundqvist ticked his way up in the record books, while the Rangers began to find some solid ground to settle their rocking ship.

“That’s part of the learning process, understanding what we have to do to have success,” Lundqvist said. “But the last couple games were pretty good.”