We’re still camped out up here in the Green Mountain State, where the temperature is hovering around 0, and I lost feeling in my fingers for the better part of an hour. Other than that, it’s been a good trip.

I’ll be back before long to return my attention to your favorite hockey team, but until then, thanks to everyone out there for contributing to such a meaningful 2008. I for one am hoping for better things in the year to come.

And that starts tomorrow, when I’ll be staging my own personal Winter Classic before the real one kicks off at Wrigley. If you’re in the neighborhood, bring your skates.

That’s how I’ll be celebrating the new year, which can explain the lack of updates here.

I’ll try to chime in when I can, but it will have to wait until after I overpower a mob of 6-year-olds on the ice. Hey, I have to feed my ego somehow.

Here’s wishing everyone out there a happy and healthy 2009.

So I don’t really see what all the fuss was about. The Rangers are just fine, can’t you see that?

Anyone?

Hello?

No, I think we can all agree tonight wasn’t so much a cure-all as it was a band-aid for the Rangers. But like I said earlier, the Rangers needed any win at this point, and they got it thanks to Petr Prucha and others.

“Right now, two points is two points. It stopped the bleeding,” said Scott Gomez, who had a goal and an assist in the win. “I think Valley made a joke to me that we have to win this game or its going to be five days of reading excellent print.”

In other words, it would have been five days of reading and thinking about all that ails this team. There is still plenty of time to do that, because let’s just say this was not the game that gave Corey Potter much reason to unpack his suitcase in Hartford. But it was at least a needed show of resolve before the end of the year.

As for Prucha, what more can the guy do? He returns to the lineup after 10 games out and scores a huge goal against the Penguins, then comes back after eight games and does the same thing against the Islanders. No one is expecting him to score like that every night. But it’s apparent this team needs his type of energy more than once a month.

“What can I say? It’s tough to be out of the lineup for so long,” Prucha said. “I’m not going to lie to you. It is frustrating. But I got a chance again and I scored again. I hope I’m in the lineup the next game. That’s how I have to take it right now: Game by game.”

So the Islanders are the worst team in the NHL, and now they’re again out with Rick DiPietro, who Scott Gordon just announced will miss tonight with a strained groin.

All of that would be reason for the Rangers to exhale, except, of course, they’re in no position to exhale. Losers of three straight, a win tonight, regardless of the quality of the opponent, allows the Rangers a brief respite from the mild hysteria that has surrounded them.

A loss means it will be a looong five days until the next game (which is in Washington against the Caps, by the way).

Some notes:

Investigators looking into the death of Rangers prospect Alexei Cherepanov say the 2007 first-round draft pick “had been blood doping for several months”:http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/news/story?id=3797614 on top of suffering from myocarditis, a condition where not enough blood gets to the heart.

Russia’s federal Investigative Committee said experts concluded from analysis of blood and urine samples that for several months Cherepanov “engaged in blood doping.” There was no elaboration in the statement, and a spokeswoman at the committee refused further comment.

The committee said the club’s medical team may carry legal liability, contending a “row of gross violations was committed by the medical brigade” helping Cherepanov.

“Among them, doctors arrived on the scene a full 12 minutes after Cherepanov collapsed, and the battery on the defibrillator to attempt shock Cherepanov’s heart back into life was drained, the statement said.

Prosecutors this month accused the club’s director of negligence. Mikhail Denisov has since been fired, and Monday’s statement did not mention him.

Well, if Tom Renney is going to deprive any defensemen of ice time for not delivering on expectations, he’ll have to deprive them in 2009.

With Corey Potter going back to Hartford yet again, the Rangers are back to having only six blueliners, which means Renney isn’t in a position to bench anyone tonight. Michal Rozsival goes back in after missing Saturday’s loss, and Wade Redden and the red-hot Dmitri Kalinin (riding a one-game goal-scoring streak) remain in as well.

Why the team’s continued aversion to carrying a seventh defenseman? The easy answer has to do with saving money toward the cap, while also allowing Potter to play as opposed to sitting with the Rangers. But it’s not like Potter would cost the Rangers that much, and it’s not like he’s been festering on the bench for weeks on end.

And one would think even having him around might serve as a reminder to the players in front of him. But if that’s going to happen, it’ll have to be after the new year.

In other news:

When it became apparent shortly after July 1 that this was going to be the group the Rangers would forge ahead with, my theory on how the team would fare went something like this:

Without some of the heavyweights who comprised the core of the team the previous two seasons, I thought the Rangers were short a few important pieces, and shouldn’t have been expected to do much as a result. But I also thought the team would be more cohesive without as many egos in the dressing room. I thought less starpower would give way to more balance, and that a defensive-minded system and a world-class goalie would at least help make the team competitive.

Basically what I expected to happen was for the Rangers to start slow, perhaps feed off low expectations not unlike the way they did coming out of the lockout, and then grow into a playoff team as the season carried on.

So now here we are almost halfway through the season, and it turns out I was only partially right. The Rangers, at least record-wise, are better than their roster says they should be, but they’ve traveled a different trajectory than I anticipated. Rather than start slowly, they gathered momentum quickly, which probably inflated expectations both internally and externally. And now the team doesn’t appear to be handling those expectations well.

It’s all conjecture, of course, but the point is the Rangers are still what they are: a flawed team that has enough pieces to be competitive, but has minimal room for error. The mistakes have piled up recently, be it because of a lack of effort or an overall disconnect, and it’s come at the price of valuable points in the standings.

Can the Rangers’ slump be attributable to  coaching? To a point, sure. If a coach lays out a system for his players and those players have strayed from that system, it’s the coach who ultimately deserves the blame.

And there are things Tom Renney could do differently, whether it’s holding certain players more accountable when they’ve played poorly, or in giving other players more of a chance than they’ve been given. If you want to take it a step further, you can blame the special teams problems and the abundance of too-many-men penalties on the coaching as well.

But those issues are only symptoms of a larger problem, and I maintain that Renney is merely scrambling to play the hand he’s been dealt. He’s not the one who signed the likes of Wade Redden, Dmitri Kalinin, and Patrick Rissmiller in July, nor is he the one who let Jaromir Jagr leave for Siberia when the forward clearly wanted to remain a Ranger.

So yes, there are steps now that can be taken to get this group of players back on track, especially when you consider it was a group that had no problem winning when the season began. But you could change coaches tomorrow, and many of the same problems would still be here.

In other news:

Well, give the Rangers credit: this time, no one was trying to dress this game up as anything other than what it was.

“Awful,” Tom Renney said. “Brain-dead hockey.”

It is reaching a point where changes have to be considered, and when I asked players about the specter of this group being pulled apart, no one dismissed the concern.

“That is always the case, no matter what team you play on,” Paul Mara said. “If you don’t win, there are changes. We don’t want that. This is the best group of guys I have ever played with. And you ask 22 guys in this locker room and they’ll all say the same thing. We all want to be here, but we have to start winning.”

When I asked Renney as well about the prospect of personnel changes, the coach originally said he wasn’t sure how to answer. But he did use it as an opportunity to rip into his team.

“I can tell you I’m not happy with how our team played. I’m not happy with performance from some very key members of our hockey club, who need to be better,” Renney said. “They need to step up and start taking charge of this hockey club and start playing the way they can. If we do that, we won’t have to worry about making personnel changes. We’ll strengthen ourselves internally by how we choose to play. Nobody has to worry about their jobs at all. Show up. Play hard. Compete. Battle. Want it bad enough. Have some urgency in your game.”

Who was Renney referring to? I later pulled the coach aside to ask him to specify, but he only said I could probably guess on my own.

So take your pick. Chris Drury went minus-3. The line of Markus Naslund, Nikolai Zherdev, and Scott Gomez was invisible. Wade Redden was dreadful. The list goes on….

Colton Orr’s condition has improved enough that he is expected to play tonight against the Devils, meaning Petr Prucha will be a scratch for the eighth straight game (Prucha will take part in warm-ups as a precaution).

That leaves Corey Potter filling in for Michal Rozsival, who is out for family reasons, as the lone lineup change. It will be just Potter’s second NHL game—he made his debut in a loss to Calgary earlier this month—although he has become familiar enough with the Rangers based on his making the trip out West with the team last week.

That trip had Potter in the press box for all three games, and with the Christmas break that followed, he didn’t get a chance to play an actual game until last night with the Wolf Pack in Bridgeport.

“It took about half a period to get into the flow,” said Potter, who added that he got the call from the Rangers about tonight at 9 this morning. “But after that, I felt like I was back in the flow.”

How much of a flow can Potter expect to get into with the Rangers? It doesn’t sound like Rozsival is expected to be out longer than one game, so chances are Potter will be headed back to Hartford after tonight (Do we need to rename the “Greg Moore Highway”?).

But he can still hope that if he plays well enough tonight, he forces the Rangers to keep him around. Strangely enough, Potter’s best hope for staying would be if Dmitri Kalinin continues to falter, which is somewhat complicated when you consider he’ll be paired with Kalinin tonight.

Scott Clemmensen is in net for the Devils.

Update, 8:15 p.m.: Yikes!

Was it as bad on TV as it looked in person?

The Rangers are still terribly disconnected in their own zone, and most of their defensemen appear skittish with the puck on their stick (Hey Wade Redden, your team is wearing blue tonight!). Throw in two questionable calls on Marc Staal, and this team should feel lucky it’s only down 2-1.

Best case scenario: a chance to regroup in between periods, a kill of the rest of a Devils penalty, and, well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves….

Update, 9:06 p.m.: So much for the best case scenario. So many questions: What has happened to Scott Gomez? Why can’t Marc Staal get off a clean shot on the power play? How did the Rangers ever beat the Devils twice already this year?

However dim you think the future is for the Rangers, it’s safe to say they will not be in the running for the No. 1 overall pick in next June’s draft.

After watching this goal by John Tavares in the World Junior Championship, you wonder if the team should consider trading up.

Meanwhile, the 7:30 start tonight can be chalked up to this afternoon’s St. John’s game. That means the Garden floor is being transformed as we speak.

That also means the Rangers better not count on a third-period comeback on what is likely going to be choppier than normal ice.