It’s a long season. Not long enough to affect a Panther buy-in apparently, or long enough for Josh Anderson to heal or to match Henrik Lundqvist’s face these days but certainly not short. It hasn’t even taken all 82 games for the young Rangers–who started 3-5-1 and were 19-18-4 on January 4–to get back into the playoff race. Now we’ll see if the year has too much length for them to stay in it.

After winning 11-of-14, they crashed in back-to-back games against the onrushing Flyers over the weekend, just as Columbus and Florida lost consecutive games to Philadelphia in the past three weeks. Both have shown scant signs of bouncing back since. So much for the assumption, which seemed quite reasonable at the 50-game point, that a good team in the Eastern Conference is going to get left out of the playoffs. Now the question has become which one has enough left for the final five weeks to right itself?

After getting handled Friday night in Philly, the Rangers essentially lost a special teams battle for two periods on Sunday before almost making it interesting in the third. A post-game inspection turned up burn marks on their hands; the rope was held. The Rangers then played the Cup champion Blues dead even in a 2-1 loss on Tuesday night. But Phillip Di Giuseppe is now skating where Chris Kreider was two games ago, so it’s going to be tough.

The good news is that things are tough all over.

Pittsburgh’s failure last week to win a single game against three consecutive deadline sellers seems almost as unfathomable as the 18-5-2 pace the Penguins kept without Sidney Crosby. The Penguins are looking like just another team in a watered-down mix now.

The Lightning couldn’t sustain a 23-2-1 run–as if anybody could–and now Tampa Bay has lost Steven Stamkos. The Hurricanes shuffled some deck chairs on the Titanic at the deadline, but failed to address their biggest issue–goaltending.

No Oliver Bjorkstrand now for Columbus on top of no Elvis Merzlikins on top of no Seth Jones or Cam Atkinson or Anderson, not to mention Artemi Panarin. The Blue Jackets, regulation winners of two of their last 12 and trailing by two goals on Sunday night, had managed just two shots in the first ten minutes of the third period until Vancouver penalties helped Columbus erupt for a precious win.

So thanks to overtime or shootout losses–five of them by the Jackets in an 8-game stretch¬–they still cling to a playoff spot. Just another couple weeks and the season will reach the point where true believers can do it on adrenaline sometimes. Just hang in there and maybe you can get as hot as Dale Tallon’s seat.

Perseverance is well practiced by the Islanders, accustomed to working on tight margins, Casey Cizikas and Adam Pelech aside, the Islanders are not out of bodies or energy, just remain short of skill. Yet despite a 13-14-6 stretch, they too, cling to a playoff spot, in part because the Panthers are 5-8-2 since the break.

So much for thinking 98 points might be needed to get in. Haven’t heard any cries lately that the competitive imbalance between the two Eastern Conference Divisions begs for a change in the playoff system either. The basic mediocrity of the league just took a little longer to show itself this year, that’s all.

Even without Stamkos until maybe the second round, a Tampa Bay team that ran up 128 points a year ago until suffering a ghastly live-and-learn experience in the playoffs, remains on paper the best. Boston, a finalist a year go, isn’t any weaker, nor is Washington, which though a month removed from it best hockey, is still a roster just one year removed from a Cup. Philadelphia, despite considerable inexperience, is emerging as a team that could win a couple rounds. And the law of averages suggests somebody low on energy at the turn of March is going to be able to turn it on again.

Teams may be short in depth but not in coaching that can help keep the panic point low, as John Tortorella remarkably has done in Columbus. Considering the circumstances, nobody has done a better job this season than he has, unless it is David Quinn, unless it is Quinn’s GM, Jeff Gorton.

After the Rangers traded away four consecutive first-round picks to fuel the a run to a final and two conference finals, nobody had reason to expect them to regenerate a team of promise this quickly. But they have, even with full impact of the lottery fortune that turned up Kaapo Kakko yet to be felt.

Gorton turned Derrick Brassard into Mika Zibanejad; Rick Nash into Ryan Lindgren; second and third picks into Adam Fox, and Neal Pionk into Jacob Trouba, plus oversaw the entry level scouting of Alexander Georgiev and Igor Shesterkin that no longer leaves the franchise dependent on 38-year-old Lundqvist.

“Our young players have really made a jump,” said Quinn.

“Fox and Lindgren have had an impact. We have zero reservations about whom we put them out against. Kakko continues to improve. Brett Howden is playing his best hockey since he has been here and our top players have delivered.

“Just because you are wearing the same jersey doesn’t mean you are a team. We had so many new faces early on that there was a little bit of a feeling out process. But when we were below .500 there was belief in the locker room we could make a run.”

Panarin, better than advertised even at $11 million a year, and Zibanejad are true, team-carrying, worth even Madison Square Garden prices-of-admission, game breakers. When The Letter went out to the season ticket holders, followed soon by Ryan McDonagh, a Ranger management was demonstrating patience not shown by this franchise since. . . well, God invented the puck. The Rangers would be back when until the squeegee guys returned and now both have reemerged just two years since the last playoff appearance. And the speed with which the talent has been regenerated is matched by how fast Quinn has gotten this team playing with belief.

Of course that can be self-sustaining when you win nine straight road games. With Lundqvist now a backup, the only true veterans are Marc Staal and Brendan Smith and it’s supposed to get harder down the stretch. This year it might not, though. The future looks good and there still may even be a present thrown in.