There was nothing easy abut it, and there it was certainly ugly.
On Saturday afternoon, the Rangers found them,selves trailing their rival, the Islanders, in a matinee late into the third period. 
With a face-off in the Islanders’ zone, Artemi Panarin collected the puck at the edge of the left circle and in one movement wristed a shot home into the upper corner, off the iron, to tie the game, 2-2.
The goal came at15:43 of the third, and forced an extra session.
“I tried to find a lane between the legs, the player’s legs,” Panarin said. “I did not really see the goalie, just trying to shoot the puck between the legs and I think it touched someone, the defenseman. It worked.”
Igor Shesterkin, who made 34 saves, many of them highlight reels, saved his best with with eight seconds left in the extra session on a windmill glove save of a wrister from Mathew Barzal.
Shesterkin placed doubts in many minds in January when he could not see the puck. Much of that doubt and criticism was here on these pages. Saturday, he proved many wrong.
The Rangers set a mark for wins in a season, 54, with the victory on Saturday.
“I think it says a lot,” Rangers coach Peter Laviolette said of setting the franchise record for wins. “There’s still one more regular-season game left and you want to make sure you’re doing your best to make sure you’re getting the two points, getting the wins, and if you do that well enough, then you get a chance to play for the Stanley Cup.
“The regular season has to happen for everybody, 82 games, and the fact that this group was able to battle hard the way they did and collect 54 [wins], I think that’s something they should be proud of from a regular-season standpoint.”
They got to that mark when Panarin hit in the skills competition, and Vincent Trocheck sealed it with a second marker on skills, in a 3-2 win.
After a scoreless opening stanza, Braden Schneider staked the Rangers to a 1-0 lead on a shorthanded strike at 4:33 of the middle frame.
Schneider scored after the Islanders turned the puck over the offensive offensive zone and went in a 3-on-1 rush with Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider. His initial shot was stopped and scored off his own rebound from the right side of the cage.
The Rangers managed to hold the Isles scoreless on five power play chances.
“Everything was working,” Trocheck said of the penalty kill. “It was just really good pressure, really good support for each other. I thought we did a really good job of dragging pucks back whenever we had possession on their power play, which kills a lot of time. That was big.”
The Islanders dropped to 37-27-16, snapping a six-game win streak.
“It’s a big point for us,” Islanders coach Patrick Roy said. “In the same way we’d love to have those two points, don’t get me wrong. It was a hard-fought game, both teams had their chances, but we felt like we could have ended up with that game on our side.”
The Islanders replied to the Rangers’ goal with a pair from Brock Nelson.
“When you’re up late and you lose it, it hurts,” Nelson said. “And then you take a step back and think about how tight the race is, so many different outcomes and scenarios that could happen. So, to get one [point], that’s good.”
Nelson potted his first at 11:42, scoring from below the right circle for a 1-1 tie.
“Just trying to support those guys, get open, nothing flashy but be hard on it,” Nelson said. “I thought we were able to get a couple off that.”
He collected his double with 28 seconds left in the second to make it 2-1 to the Islanders headed to the third.
“After it was 2-1, ‘Shesty’ had to come in with some really big saves,” Laviolette said. “Sometimes we were pressing and sometimes we turned the puck over at the wrong time, the penalty shot. There’s probably a half a dozen key saves that he made at 2-1 that kept it that way. Guys kept pushing and eventually got to tie it up, take it to overtime.”
Ilya Sorokin made 41 saves in the loss.
“We had chances in that third to make it a 3-1 game,” Roy said. “Penalty shot, [Jean-Gabriel] Pageau had an open net, [Casey] Cizikas hits the crossbar. I was pretty proud of the way our guys responded to the push they made at the start of that third period.”
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