Stations Of The Cross

There was a moment there during the recent hospitalization of Pope John Paul II that I thought the old Polish fellow was coming to the window to announce that the NHL lockout was over and that we could return to Madison Square Garden to eat bland Blimpie sandwiches and watch the Sudafed-crazed brutes skate around on the league's worst ice. A papal intervention would mean the Rangers could strap into their famous blue shirts and get the Dolan family stories off the real estate pages and back on the sports pages where they deserve their nightly burial.

But no, the Pontiff merely continued in his stoic suffering, his aides denouncing wealthy nations that subscribe to a "religion of health" with expectations that modern medicine, or fervent use of WebMD, will cure all of humanity's ills.

For hockey fans, most of whom would fit into the back room of Milano's Bar at this point, the religion of choice should not be Catholicism, but Christian Science. All healing is done through simple faith in the mouthguard and prayer that the ACL holds out through another overtime draw. Besides, all those good Catholic schools around the city are suddenly for sale or merging with other institutions of learning.

With no Rangers games on cable in the late stages of a never-ending winter, fans are forced to watch NY1's "scholar/athlete" features, like the recent one about the goodie-two-shoes chess champion from Stuyvesant High who is also the goalie on the school's hockey team. He's going to Princeton next year, and he plays soccer, too, and has his own website which, of course, is quite popular with his overachieving classmates. The hockey footage used by NY1 is a repetitive 11-second loop showing this kid skating that lonely circle around his goal crease-probably at the Chelsea Piers ice rink-not a teammate in sight, and certainly no game action to speak of.

But I switched the UHF dial just in time to see the NHL officially kill the professional hockey season like Robert Blake taking out the Clutter family, and then later, his wife.

Sure, had there been a truncated Rangers campaign to help flip the early pages of the 2005 calendar, it would have been filled with pulled muscles, rusty refs and the usual boring atmosphere in that corporate waiting room that takes up the blocks between 34th and 36th streets.

There would have been more overspending on an underachieving roster-the Mets on ice-and the whole entertainment package would again be dulled by sheer non-spectacle. Something you sit through whenever free tickets arise from exgirlfriends who have moved to Connecticut and can't attend. Up there, she can see the Hartford Wolfpack, the minor-league team of the Rangers, or hang out with 50 Cent in Mike Tyson's old pad in Farmington, or wait for that guy on death row to finally get executed, or cheer on the sick governor who replaced the sleazy guy. Plenty to do up in the Nutmeg State.

Truth be told, minor league hockey is hard to get excited about, and college hockey is but a masquerade version of the game, without Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman in expensive disguises, guarded by the sharp-toothed Scientologists who work the Ninth Avenue Food Fair each summer.

Hockey hackles could be raised, however, if more people knew that Columbia University's hockey coach is one of the Russian defensemen from that disgraced Red Army squad that lost to the Americans at Lake Placid in 1980. Godspeed, then, to those 2012 Olympics choosers, as they are now thankfully on their way to Moscow next month, and pray that they select that sparkling city for the 2012 debacle. Maybe then the U.S. could boycott the games again, this time because of sour grapes and wasted money that was the NYC 2012 "Candidate City" idea, or because the Ruskies left behind too many dud landmines in Afghanistan.

I miss the Rangers because sitting through those games was a cold-weather penance that occupied odd corners in these dark months. Rangers hockey for the past half-decade has been the kind of disjointed defeat-by-subcommittee that explains why and how Boston has surged ahead of New York City in sports-team quality and championship quantity. Sometimes, while sitting on your hands at the Garden in between periods of yet another Rangers loss, it felt like if you stared hard enough at the Bud Light Zamboni, that its driver would transform into the Russian romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov. He would stop his utilitarian vehicle in the corner of the rink, step gingerly toward the Geico ad on the ice surface, and in a single spotlight with no Chumbawumba playing over the PA, recite some of his work, perhaps even read "The Sail."

That, comrade, is why I miss the Rangers.

-Spike Vrusho