COMMENTARY : Time of the Rangers’ Lives Has Become Most Trying

It was supposed to be the best summer of their lives, the time of their lives, because they were the New York Rangers who finally won the Stanley Cup and they were entitled. They would rest and heal and celebrate a little more and remember everything that happened on the way to June 14, when they gave New York City a sports night to end them all. But once the summer began, the Rangers could not stop it. Neither could anybody else in the NHL. Now it is the hockey summer that has turned into winter.

“It’s the second summer none of us ever wanted,” Mike Richter was saying in the Rangers’ locker room at the Playland rink in Rye, N.Y. “Pretty soon, we’re all going to find out if we all got a year older without ever playing a game.”

It is 10 in the morning, and Richter is there and Brian Leetch is there and Colin Campbell, who will be the Rangers’ new coach whenever there is a season again, is in his office on the telephone. Eddie Olczyk, one of the best guys for the Rangers even though he rarely got into the game last season, walks through the room and drops plain blue practice jerseys in front of Richter and Leetch.

“I never thought it would come to this,” Olczyk says quietly, and Leetch, one of the heroes of last spring the way Richter was, one of the great players the Rangers ever have had, looks up from his locker in a hockey room much too quiet and says, “It didn’t have to come to this.”

Then Leetch looks around and says, “Where are the Russians?,” referring to Sergei Zubov and Sergei Nemchinov and Alexei Kovalev. If there are six players, they can at least play three-on-three, and the whole thing feels a little more like a real practice. It feels like a hockey season on the ice outside, but still it is just another hockey ghost town in the hockey summer that has turned, unbelievably, into winter.

The NHL owners vote today, and will turn the latest proposal from the players down cold. It is not the end, of course. Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner, keeps sliding back the day when the season will be called off for good.

“We’re not going to be able to pick up where we left off,” Richter says. “It’s not going to be the season we thought we could have, coming off the Cup. If we don’t play again until next fall, we’ll still be the Rangers. We just won’t be the same team.”

He has his skates on now. They all do. Six of the Stanley Cup champions walk out of the locker room and get on the ice. This is the defense of their title. This is all the season they have. They get ready to play three-on-three at Playland.