Rangers captured New York’s heart in 1994 like no other team

For one brief shining moment, there was Camelot.

Twenty-five years ago, Mark Messier was King Arthur, Brian Leetch, Mike Richter and Adam Graves were Knights of the Roundtable and history was made at the Garden, reverberating in the building and up the Canyon of Heroes through which the Rangers strode with glee as champions while a grateful city exulted.

A quarter of a century later, the memories resound and the moments in time, forever frozen in history, live on. The sights and the sounds can be conjured at the most fleeting notice. It has been 25 years since Captain Courageous said They’d Win That Night; 25 years since Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!; 25 years since the Save by Richter! against Pavel Bure; 25 years since Craig MacTavish won the final faceoff; 25 years since Messier went all “The Shining” upon receiving the Stanley Cup from Gary Bettman.

It has been 25 years and it seems like yesterday. It has been 25 years and the 1994 Rangers stand as one of our city’s all-time sports royalty teams, just as do the 1968 Jets.

For they represent the definition of once in a lifetime.

Never before and never since has hockey occupied such a vital part of the city’s pulse and life. The Rangers are an important franchise here, with a deep history. David Quinn, the Boston-bred fellow who happens to now coach the Blueshirts, said Thursday that when the Rangers are good, it is good for hockey. I will say this: When the Rangers are good, it is good for the city.

The Emile Francis teams are beloved. They represent the Boomers and everyone knows how we glory in nostalgia, excuse me for a second, I need to reset my SiriusXM to 18 for The Beatles Channel. But even as Jean Ratelle, Vic Hadfield and that era were celebrated the past two years and would be again if Brad Park joins them in the rafters, there is always that shroud that kind of hangs over everything. They didn’t win. They did everything but win. They might be the best team in NHL history never to win.

The 1994 guys were not in for that. Never has a spotlight shined so brightly on a hockey team in New York. Never has a hockey team not only withstood that glare, but basked in it. The internal chaos coach Mike Keenan wrought that was accompanied by a dysfunctional relationship with general manager Neil Smith produced almost constant tension. The news, much broken by Post colleague Mark Everson, of Keenan’s treachery during the finals, produced unprecedented madness.

The Rangers were A Story.

It was a big-time team, with big-time players for whom finishing second was not an option. If the Rangers had not won Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals at the Meadowlands, chances are the entire crew — starting with Smith, Keenan and Messier — would have been run out of town. Few teams have operated under a more stringent championship-or-bust expectation and demand than that one. To think, they were a game away from extinction and Messier responded with one of the seminal performances in sports history.

Joe Namath in January 1969. Messier in May 1994.

This was a unique operation that needed Keenan on that wall, needed Smith to provide sane and loyal opposition, needed Messier to have truly one of the great seasons of any professional athlete in New York sports history, needed Richter to make a half-dozen spectacular saves in Game 6 against the Devils before Messier could get the first of his three, needed Leetch to be the ultimate difference-maker in talent.

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It’s May 25, 1994, exactly 20 years ago on Sunday,…

Once since 1940.

When they won, everything changed somehow. The building still was full, and there were rocking moments, particularly during the 1997 playoffs when the remnants of the ’94 squad were joined by a spear carrier named Wayne Gretzky and made it to the conference finals before losing to the Flyers. But it never has been quite the same. That doesn’t mean the next one (going on, well, 25 years) won’t be celebrated. Rest assured, it will. But it will not be the same.

Folks talk about Stephane Matteau never having to buy a drink here, but that should apply to them all to Eddie Olczyk and Sergei Zubov and Jeff Beukeboom and Doug Lidster; to Glenn Anderson, to the splendid Steve Larmer, to Glenn Healy to Alex Kovalev to Sergei Nemchinov to Kevin Lowe.

To all of them who won in 1994.

To all of them who produced a once in a lifetime moment for the Rangers and for New York.

To all of them who produced that one shining moment known as Camelot.