A team doesn’t win two straight Stanley Cup Finals while heading to their third consecutive to try and make it three straight by accident. But that’s who the Rangers had to contend with in the Eastern Conference Finals; a Tampa Bay Lightning squad chasing history.

And after going up 2-0 on the defending champs and seemingly having them on the ropes, the Rangers, while revealing a lot of promise, showed that they’re not at the top of the class just yet.

“It was obviously a lot of good experience,” said Adam Fox after the Game 6 loss. “Wished for a better ending but definitely promising for our team.”

It’s true, it definitely was a lot of good experience for a young and gritty Rangers team, and to be right there almost every step of the way with the champs does show a lot of promise. But right now, the Blueshirts take no solace in moral victories, not when the wounds are still so fresh.

“Right now, it's not easy,” said Jacob Trouba. “I'm sure we'll think about it and reflect, but right now, it's not a good feeling.”

Not a good feeling is an understatement. Both Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider said they felt “empty” during their emotional post game news conference. It can’t help that almost every loss was decided by razor thin margins, with two of them being one-goal games.

At the end of the day, though, Tampa Bay’s championship pedigree was simply too much for the Rangers.

“They got timely goals,” Kreider said. “It felt like we were in every game.”

The Rangers were in every game, thanks to the superb play of their goalie, Igor Shesterkin. Their best player all season, Shesterkin continued to shine in the series, garnering praise from his teammates and head coach who called his performance “special” and “outstanding”.

But a team has to score on the other end to put itself in position to win and the Rangers just couldn’t do that consistently enough throughout the series.

“We would’ve liked to generate a little more (offense) but one-goal games could usually go either way, a chance here or there,” Fox said. “Obviously good goalies and they’re an experienced team, obviously they’ve been here before.”

The Lightning also have an “outstanding” and “special” goalie of their own in Andrei Vasilevskiy who, after a tough start to the series, held the Rangers to five goals in the final four games.

Some of that, however, head coach Gerard Gallant attributes to fatigue, considering the Blueshirts played 20 games in a stretch of 40 days.

“There’s no doubt (fatigue) showed up,” he said.

But the players don’t want to hear talk of fatigue, with Zibanejad saying “these are the games we all wanted to play.”

While it’s courageous to knock down the notion that they were tired, it was clear that they lost some of their zip towards the end, especially for a team as inexperienced as the Rangers who had never gone through the gauntlet of playing in two Game 7’s already up to that point.

Still, the Rangers should be proud of how hard they fought and the journey they took to be here because some time in the near future, they could be the ones chasing history.

“You know you look back and we could’ve been done in five games in that first round, but we battled, it took everyone,” Fox said.

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