Three and ohhhhh baby!

The last time the Rangers started a season 3-0, I was a fourteen year old sophmore in high school. Guy Lafleur was playing for the Nordiques in what would be his final season in the NHL (after playing the previous season for the Blueshirts). And...er...Georger Herbert Walker Bush was president.

Yes, 1989-90 was a long time ago, although I remember Z100 (at the time New York's number one radio station) jumping on the bandwagon early, playing a parody "This is Our Year" song after the seventh or eighth game. And don't ask why I remember these things, I just do. I need help, okay?

Thanks to the commute from a late night at work I saw only the first ten minutes of the first period and the final fifteen minutes of the third period. The one thing I took away from tonight: I don't know how long this Voros-Zherdev-Dubinsky line will be together, but wow!

In 2005, Jess Rubenstein (who's currently writing up Rangers prospects at Prospect Park) told anyone who would listen that Brandon Dubinsky was something special while covering him with the Portland Winter Hawks. Doubt him, Jess would say, and he'd go out of his way to show you how wrong you were to doubt him.

He made enough of a believer out of me that, before the third game of the 2006 playoffs against the Devils (try not to remember the outcome), while Don Maloney was being interviewed in the lobby at MSG, I was behind him repeatedly yelling "bring up freaking Dubinsky already!". When the cameras cut, he turned, looked at me, and asked how I knew about him.

This kid is really something special. It's a brutal thing to put a label on a player (Lemieux, Lindros and Crosby have each been heralded as 'The Next One'; to this point Lemieux lived up to the billing, Crosby is showing the potential as long as he stops the whining, and Lindros is counting stuffed animals after suffering three hundred concussions in his career), but Dubinsky has a bit of Messier in him. Don't forget, in the Moose's first NHL season, he was a third/fourth line player who wasn't a major force, and he worked his way up to become the 1A center on the Oilers dynasty.

Now understand this: I am not saying Dubinsky is the second coming of Mark Messier. Absolutely not.

But there are some similarities between them. Where Dubinsky winds up is strictly up to him.

Admit it, though. It's refreshing to see a player like this come up through the system and develop here, rather than get traded for, say, Chris Chelios.

We've come a long way from the days of John Davidson talking down youth on the Rangers by saying "So-and-so needs to earn his ice time" while a 41 year-old Messier coughed up the puck and didn't skate hard to get back into the play.

A long way indeed.

This could be a fun season. At least it's off to a good start.