Theo Fleury snickered when asked if he cared to weigh in with an opinion on the Great White North’s Great Debate – Who should be in nets for the Olympic team, Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Curtis Joseph or even Sean Burke?

“We’ll see how it stands after the game,” Fleury said with an impish grin (what other kind from an imp?), some eight hours before the Rangers faced Roy’s Avalanche at the Garden. “We might know more then.”

We do know more. We know that Roy, who came in with three consecutive shutouts that had earned him an apparent stranglehold on Wayne Gretzky’s nomination for the job, was unable to tie the modern NHL record of four straight established 53 seasons ago by Montreal’s Bill Durnan.

We know that not only couldn’t Roy get out of town with the record, he couldn’t so much as get out of the second period against the Rangers, pulled after having been torched for five goals on 18 shots in 28:18, leaving with his team in tatters, down by 5-1. And we know that the Rangers continue to be a November force.

The final was 5-3, propelling the Blueshirts seven games over .500 (14-7-1-1) for the first time since 1995-96. It gave the Eastern Conference leaders their fifth straight at the Garden, their longest Broadway run since 1996-97. And it gave the team 17 of 18 potential points in going 8-0-0-1 over the last nine games.

Roy, of course, was Canada’s goaltender in its 1998 Nagano failure to medal when beaten in the semifinals on a shootout by Dominik Hasek’s Czech Republic, and then by Finland for the bronze.

“All we’ve heard in Canada since then is the hype and bull about our game going downhill, all because we lost a shootout,” said Fleury, a member of that squad who surely has earned himself a spot in Salt Lake City.

“A shootout. It’s not hockey. It might as well be Scrabble.”

Then give the Rangers a triple word score for last night. They played with poise and confidence, they took the body, they got the puck in deep against an Avalanche team that had stifled the Devils at the Meadowlands on Sunday.

Mikael Samuelsson, who would later notch his second NHL career goal, scored his first at 8:46 of the first to end Roy’s shutout streak at 192:39. It was a shorthanded goal that came with Roy about 45 feet out of the net after losing a race for the puck with Samuelsson at the top of the left circle after a Colorado failure to keep at its right point. When Colorado tied the game at 13:35, Fleury scored 15 seconds later after another Roy misadventure out of the net.

“I had a good time with [the shutout streak],” Roy said. “It was a fun ride. But now it’s over.”

Samuelsson, the well-rounded 24-year-old whom the Rangers acquired from San Jose in the Adam Graves trade, is just beginning his ride. “It was a really great feeling to score that goal,” he said. “It was my first goal, so I didn’t care whom it was against, but when my career is over, it’s going to be pretty cool to say I got my first goal against Patrick Roy.”

The once and still almost certain future Canadian Olympic goaltender, don’t you know?