It’s been a while — June 7, to be exact.
And with a quick reflection, Henrik Lundqvist has one singular memory, one starring Rangers’ teammate Chris Kreider. A memory that won’t go away.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Kreider hit the post in my head,” the franchise goalie told The Post on Monday. “But it’s just the way it goes.”
That post in Los Angeles stopped ringing just moments after Kreider hit it in the first overtime of Game 2 of the Stanley Cup finals, a championship series the Rangers would lose by the slightest margin possible in five games. Yet that post in Los Angeles is still one that rings inside Lundqvist’s head, and motivates him as he starts his preparation for this coming season, with training camp officially beginning on Sept. 18 although most of the team is already in town taking part in informal skates.
“We had the bounces early on in the playoffs, through the different series, but against L.A., we just didn’t get the breaks,” Lundqvist said before his appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”
“We had the leads, we had the looks. It’s just for some reason, it wasn’t our turn.”
If it sounds like a fatalistic mentality, it is not in the morbid sense. Instead, Lundqvist had a couple weeks of thinking about the season, returning in late-August from almost two months in his native
Sweden, and then moved on to begin thinking about this one.
“I think the first few weeks, I think you analyze everything,” he said, before being interrupted by chanting fans on 53rd Street outside of the Ed Sullivan Theater, the sing-song of ‘Hen-rik, Hen-rik’ seemingly signaling the end of the summer in Manhattan.
“You think about what was good, what was not good, what you could have done better,” he said. “Then you start appreciating all the highs you had. … There were so many, especially going into the playoffs, outdoor games, there were so many things, and after a while, it’s, ‘Yeah, it was a fun year. It was a great run we had.’ But obviously, it was disappointing, when it just ended like that.”
The Rangers are also a significantly different team now than they were back then in the California sunshine. Yet the 32-year-old, signed for the next seven years with an $8.5 million salary-cap hit, is optimistic.
“I think the core is still there,” Lundqvist said. “But to lose the guys we did, they played a big part for us last year. I hope the new guys can [come in] and transition to a different style of play, maybe, obviously different teammates, so I’m excited to see what they can bring.”