Not until the morning. Not until Saturday morning will Henrik Lundqvist turn his focus to the Game 6 potential opening-round clincher at the Garden against the Canadiens that night.
“I put so much energy into every game, that I won’t think about it until morning of game day,” Lundqvist told The Post following Thursday’s 3-2 overtime victory in Montreal put his team on the brink of advancing to Round Two. “Maybe for a minute or two right before I go to sleep on Friday, but I won’t focus on it until the next morning.”
Lundqvist and the Rangers have been here and done that many, many times before. Not to perfection, of course, not with that 2015 Game 7 conference finals defeat to the Lightning an irreversible pimple on this era’s landscape on that night on which Aura and Mystique were nothing more than the names of dancers in a gentleman’s club, to steal a phrase from Curt Schilling.
But the fact is that the King and his Court have played nine potential clinchers at the Garden beginning in 2007 and have won seven of them, the other exception the Game 6 defeat to the Caps for which head coach John Tortorella was suspended in the 2009 Water Bottle series that the Blueshirts ultimately lost in seven after holding a 3-1 lead.
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