Strange though it seems for someone who grew up in Madison, which is 943 miles west of Madison Square Garden, I am a New York Rangers fan.

There are only two reasons. First, as a lifelong UW fan growing up in the ’70s, you would naturally follow the only successful major sport at UW in that period, hockey.

Second, USA Network in its pre-NBCUniversal/Comcast days carried events from the Madison Square Garden Network, which still exists today, though it’s carried only in Noo Yawk. MSG carried events from, natch, Madison Square Garden, including Rangers hockey, Knicks basketball, boxing and professional wrestling. I cared little about the middle two (yes, I watched pro wrestling, but preferred Milwaukee’s own The Crusher to the NYC wrestlers), but followed the Rangers, the only New York team I did, or would, follow.

I watched the Rangers because that was the only NHL team I could watch. The NHL had some syndicated games in the late 1970s, but no Madison TV station carried the NHL. (The closest stations that carried the NHL were in Chicago and Duluth. Milwaukee’s then-only independent station didn’t carry the NHL either.) I could have been a Chicago Blackhawks fan, but Blackhawks owner William Wirtz, who met no one’s definition of an enlightened pro sports team owner, banned home telecasts, and the only Chicago station we got, WGN-TV, didn’t carry Blackhawks road games. (How bad was Wirtz? ESPN named the franchise the worst in pro sports in 2004. When the Blackhawks held a moment of silence after Wirtz’s death in 2007, the United Center crowd booed.)

It’s safe to say that the Rangers teams I started watching in the late ’70s were more celebrities than team-oriented hockey players. The biggest name was probably center Phil Esposito, followed by goalie John Davidson, followed by defenseman Ron Greschner, because he was married to supermodel Carol Alt, and the brothers Maloney, defenseman Dave and forward Don, star of a 7Up commercial.

The biggest hair undoubtedly belonged to forward Ron Duguay, described in 2009 by the New York Times as “an icon of the disco era,” and who, unlike Greschner, is still married to his supermodel, Kim Alexis.

Watching from Wisconsin (whose Badgers provided Rangers goaltender Wayne Thomas and forward Dean Talafous, by the way) and not metro New York, I missed this:

Given the ethos of the NHL, I suspect the Sasson participants were ridiculed mercilessly in every NHL arena once that hit the airwaves. Which is not to say that Espo, Duguay, Maloney and Anders Hedberg were the only NHL players to wear designer jeans. (I had a pair of not Sassons, but Jordache.)

The Rangers’ teams I started following were announced on TV by Jim Gordon (also the long-time New York Giants announcer) and former NHL referee Bill Chadwick, who would yell “SHOOT THE PUCK BARRY!” whenever huge defenseman Barry Beck scored. Those were the only NHL games I watched until USA Network started carrying hockey; apparently Rangers road games were carried on local TV, while MSG got the home games.

Until the 1993–94 season, the Rangers were sort of the National Hockey League’s answer to the Chicago Cubs, though going without a Stanley Cup for 54 years is not quite like going without a World Series title for 86 years. (Now 105 years, and counting.) The Rangers got to the 1979 Stanley Cup final, but lost 4 games to 1 to Montreal.

That was until the 1993–94 season, with new coach Mike Keenan, forward Mark Messier, defenseman Brian Leetch, and former UW and Olympic goalie Mike Richter in net. The Rangers won the regular-season title with more points (two for a win, one for a tie) than any other team, and won their first two playoff series. Against Hudson River archrival New Jersey, the Rangers fell behind three games to two, won game six at New Jersey when Messier, former teammate of the great Wayne Gretzky, guaranteed a win and then delivered a third-period hat trick …

… bringing us to game seven, on the Friday of 1994 Memorial Day weekend.

I watched this game from my parents’ family room on the way to visiting the in-laws. I’d stopped there for supper, saw the game-tying goal with 7 seconds left in overtime, and then sat nervously through the two overtimes while my parents must have wondered why I cared about an NHL game.

There is really nothing like an NHL overtime game in professional sports. Overtime used to be found only in the playoffs; the NHL grudgingly added five-minute overtimes, then added shootouts to settle regular-season ties. (Though teams get one point in the standings for a shootout loss, whereas they get no points for losing in regulation or OT.) I once did a college hockey overtime playoff game, and I wish I still had the sound file of the finish, which sits on a dead computer somewhere. Before that, I played in the UW Band at nine UW overtime games, all wins.

Unlike other sports, where you have some warning of what’s about to happen in overtime, there are the skaters on one end, and then the red light goes on behind the net, and the fans and announcers go bananas if the home team wins. It’s comparable to a walk-off home run in baseball or a buzzer-beater in basketball, but somehow seems more dramatic.

Four minutes into the second overtime, Stephane Matteau, who had already scored one overtime goal in the conference final against New Jersey, swiped the puck in the corner and …

The most memorable call of the game-winner comes from substitute radio announcer Howie Rose …

… who was working because the regular radio announcer, Marv Albert, was working for NBC. (Albert had an amazingly full schedule in those days.)

The win moved the Rangers to the Stanley Cup Finals against Vancouver. What happened then? Stay tuned.