In this game’s final split-second, with 7 minutes 24 seconds left in the second overtime, the Capitals’ Jason Chimera found himself behind the entire New York defense, in sole possession of a deflected puck off a Rangers stick, with nothing to do except flip the puck into an empty net for victory.

“That was a fabulous hockey game — two warrior teams,” Capitals Coach Bruce Boudreau said. “You’re almost sorry it ended on a broken play.”

Almost, but not really. This victory totally shifts this series toward the Caps and neuters at least some of the toxicity of their dismal misadventures last April. Is it an omen of a much different future? The Caps are entitled to build upon that theory.

But this was more than just a momentum-shifting game. It was a microcosm of one of the most exciting recurrent scenes in sports — a packed-house New York crowd as it reaches the heights of rooting ecstasy and the deepest gloom of impending defeat.

“What is it like to quiet a New York crowd that has been all over you all night?” I asked Chimera. A grin crossed his exhausted face: “It’s the best feeling in the world.”

New York is pride, power and competition. And aggravation. Nowhere does it seem that a city’s world view, its sense of itself, so closely hangs in the balance with its teams’ fates. Decade after decade, they risk. They suffer. No crowd gloats so gloriously, blending smarts and gall. “Can you hear us?” they bellowed in unison at Boudreau, who, on Monday, said that Madision Square Garden was kind of an old dump (it is) and that the crowds at Verizon Center were louder than they are here.

In victory, Boudreau could be gracious, no doubt grasping what a beating he’d have taken if the Rangers, who were 29-0 when leading entering the last period, had won. “I might have made a mistake by saying what I said,” Boudreau said. “Lets leave it at that and put it up to the players.”

Oh, the players heard it, too. “Losers, losers,” the fans chanted as the Caps fell behind, trying to remind Washington of its burden as the only franchise in pro sports that has blown a two-game lead in eight season-ending playoff series.

And no crowds fall so gloriously silent as those here. When Alexander Semin and Marcus Johansson scored just 57 seconds apart early in the third period to cut that 3-0 lead to 3-2, you never saw a sports arena turn into a vast haunted house so quickly. New Yorkers know what’s up. And they knew that third Caps goal to tie was coming.

They were often nearly mute, their dread perhaps infecting their team, as they waited for the blow to fall, as it finally did when the rookie Johansson scored again with 7:53 left in the third period.