Mighty Ducks Take a Bite Out of Bitter Big Apple

With three minutes to go and the Rangers down by two goals, to a six-game-old expansion team , the Madison Square Crowd let out a collective growl and began chanting the name of the winning team.

Or something close to it.

“We (starts with ‘s,’ rhymes with ‘Duck’)!”

“We (starts with ‘s,’ rhymes with Duck’)!”

There was no other way for a native New Yorker to look at it. A team from Disneyland, for heaven’s sakes, was schooling Mark Messier and the boys on their own home turf.

A team dressed like eggplants.

A team led by Terry Yake.

A team called “The Mighty Ducks.”

Now Ranger fans are about as jaded as the trim on the Ducks’ uniforms, but they figure they have a right to be. No Stanley Cups since 1940. No Stanley Cup playoffs last season despite the presence of Messier, Brian Leetch, Mike Gartner, Adam Graves, Tony Amonte and Mike Richter. And now this--a 4-2 loss to a bunch of third- and fourth-liners from Anaheim who were playing the first regular-season road game in the history of the franchise.

With five minutes to go, a television camera zoomed in on a Gardenite, presumably a regular, because he came prepared. Yawning, the fan reached down, pulled out the latest copy of Time and began to catch up on the news of the week.

Earlier, when the Rangers were dribbling pucks off their skates and cracking slap shots high off the plexiglass--anywhere but on net--a cynic seated behind the Ducks’ rather relaxed goalie, Guy Hebert, glanced skyward and loudly pleaded, “A shot on goal! Please! Please! I’m begging you!”

He began toasting Ranger shots on goal. Already, he had been toasting Ranger passes, Ranger forechecks and Ranger line changes. By the end of the first period, he was thoroughly toasted, which moved him to stand, wobble and start quacking as the Ducks entered the tunnel next to him.

A grown man, juggling a beer and quacking.

A pitiful sight, really.

“Hey,” he shouted to no one in particular, “I paid enough money to do that.”

He belched and squinted at the scoreboard.

“We’re losing! “

This was a hard one to take. The Ducks have no offense, right? Well, Yake, an undersized right wing left unprotected by Hartford, outscored the Rangers by his lonesome, producing the first hat trick in Mighty Duck history. The Ducks were supposed to be intimidated by the Gah-den and all those retired jerseys hanging from the rafters, right? The Ducks looked more nervous in their first intrasquad scrimmage. Here, in this cradle of East Coast hockey, the Ducks scored in the first 13 minutes, had a 2-0 lead after 31 minutes and basically behaved as if they had doing this for years, instead of mere hours.

From the stickwork of Yake and Anatoli Semenov to the puck-stopping of Hebert (40 nonchalant saves) to the body-sacrificing slams of Mark Ferner and Sean Hill, it was a remarkable performance, especially when one considers how most of the recent expansion outfits have handled life on the road.

San Jose went 0-13 on the road in its inaugural season, then tied one, then won at Calgary on the last day of November.

Ottawa went an unthinkable 0-39 on the road before mercifully breaking the ice on April 10 against the New York Islanders.

The Ducks, meanwhile, are 1-0, after playing three home games in five nights, flying 3,000 miles the next day and skating 60 minutes against the Rangers the next.

“I was concerned,” Ducks Coach Ron Wilson had to admit, and who could have blamed him? “Three games in five nights, all of them tough, tough battles, and then flying coast-to-coast. We could have come in here and gotten spanked. Then, we’re looking at a very long road trip.

“But we bounded right out there from the first period on. Actually, I was a little surprised we skated as well as he did. We went at it hard for 60 minutes.”

Wilson never feared anything as gruesome as Ottawa II, but was worried about the “snowball” effect that a lopsided loss Tuesday could have had on his team, where “you start thinking, ‘Oh, we’re tired, oh, the schedule, oh, boy, we’re going to have trouble here.’

“This is going to make our next couple road trips a lot easier.”

Credit Troy Loney, the Duck captain, with a goal and an assist, though you won’t find the latter in the scoring summary. The goal came in the first period, the assist some time before.

“A lot of the guys were saying, ‘We’ve never won here, we’ve never won here,’ ” said Loney, winner of two Stanley Cups while a Pittsburgh Penguin. “But I told them I expect to. I’m spoiled, I guess, but I told them how I loved playing here when I was with Pittsburgh.

“The crowd is loud and can be intimidating if you let it be. What you need to do is take the crowd out of the game, quiet them down. And we did that right away tonight.”

And more. By the final minute, the Ducks had won the grudging respect of the crusty Garden crowd, which cheered the visitors as they left the ice.

“Way to go, Ducks!”

“D! . . . D! . . . D!” yelled an admirer of the rugged defense he had just witnessed.

And how about this: “The Mighty Ducks are no joke.”

If they can make it here, well, it’s still no guarantee they can make it anywhere. But it beats the Rangers, and, most certainly, it beats any alternatives.