After falling short in a few games this season they felt they should’ve won, the Rangers picked up a victory in a game they probably only half deserved.

Snapping their three-game losing streak at home, the Rangers captured a 4-1 win over the Coyotes on Sunday night at Madison Square Garden despite a glaringly slow start that forced goalie Igor Shesterkin to tap into his heroic nature. It may have taken a while to get to their game, but the Rangers cruised to victory once they did.

“Sometimes this game doesn’t totally make sense,” said Chris Kreider, who made it 3-0 on the power play less than five minutes into the third period. “Didn’t play well in the first 20, come away 0-0, and we were able to find it and find a way to win. At the same time, it was something that we did a lot of last year and haven’t necessarily had for the first 16 games of this season.

“There’s been a handful of games where we felt like we deserved a better result, but finding ways to win games is just as, if not more, important.”

Fingerprints of the 2020-21 Rangers were all over this game: The severely lopsided shot totals in each period; Shesterkin bailing them out with little support; sprinkle in a couple fortuitous bounces that the team was able to capitalize on at opportune times, a power-play goal and there you have the Rangers’ first three months of last season in a nutshell.

As the Rangers learned last season, however, the aforementioned occurrences are not a reliable way to win over 82 games. These are habits the club cannot fall back into. It may have worked against the lowly Coyotes, who dropped to 6-8-1 on the season, but it likely won’t against the upper-echelon teams in the NHL.

Shesterkin turned in one of his better performances of the season, stopping 31 of 32 shots. The Rangers’ netminder kept his team in the game when they could’ve fallen right out of it after a sluggish first period, in which the Blueshirts didn’t record their first shot on goal until 12 ½ minutes in and were ultimately outshot 17-4 .

“It’s like last year,” head coach Gerard Gallant said with a chuckle. “Plenty of times we’ve come in here and said our goalie stole the game for us. I don’t think he had to steal it tonight because we did play a good second half, but he definitely kept it scoreless and that was important.”

Arizona goalie Connor Ingram looked just as locked in as he was when the Rangers played at Mullett Arena in October, until the end of the second period. Ingram poked the puck right to Barclay Goodrow in the slot, and the Rangers forward buried it to open the scoring with roughly five minutes left in the middle frame.

Less than 90 seconds later, Adam Fox swept one in from between the circles as fans in the stands screamed at him to shoot the puck. And so he did to extend his point streak to six games, which matched the Sharks’ Erik Karlsson and the Sabres’ Rasmus Dahlin for the second-longest point streak by a defensemen this season.

The Rangers primarily credited Shesterkin and the penalty kill for their stark turnaround. Kreider noted that after Ryan Carpenter — who scored his first goal as a Ranger in the third — was called for interference in the middle frame, the Rangers started getting to the net and getting inside. They were able to generate some shorthanded chances, which carried over to five-on-five play.

Ranked 11th in the NHL at 81.5 percent, the Rangers’ penalty kill fended off five of the Coyotes’ six power plays.

This was the last home game for the Rangers until after Thanksgiving, with a nine-day West Coast trip on deck that begins Thursday night in Seattle. Going into it on a high note should be advantageous.

“It’s going to be tough and it’s going to be a battle,” Gallant said. “Definitely feels a lot better when you’ve got a day off [Monday] and then you get ready for four games in seven nights. Definitely helps us.”