They won tonight. That’s the bottom line. But in the fine print is a little extra: had the offense not been on fire, the Rangers easily could have lost this game to the worst team in the league. Giving the Flyers four goals is giving them too much.

“We didn’t play good enough,” Jaromir Jagr said of tonight’s performance.

Tom Renney echoed that sentiment: “…I thought we left Philadelphia a little too much. Had we not had six [goals], obviously this could have been a different outcome.”

It could have been a different outcome, but it wasn’t. The Rangers retain the 7th seed and head into a crucial match-up against the Maple Leafs Sunday night. If the Rangers can step up on defense and continue their offensive brilliance, they will roll into the playoffs and will be good candidates to take at least the first series. Almost every good element of the Ranger game has reared its head this season, but not all of those elements have surfaced at the same time. It’s been a spotty run of lopsided, free-for-all Ranger routs, then one-goal, defensive chess matches, and then a complete defensive collapse like in Montreal.

Unless the Blueshirts can hone in on the top level of both their offensive and defensive games, there’s no easy prediction for how well this team will do. As the season draws to an end, fans can never be quite sure which Ranger team is going to take the ice each night …

But if the recent magic is any indication, that team is going to be a contender.