The Rangers have done what no other NHL team could do in the last two postseasons.

After feeding the Lightning their first consecutive playoff losses since 2019, the Rangers look like an unstoppable and determined bunch after a 3-2 victory in Game 2 Friday night at Madison Square Garden that has this team believing in itself more than ever.

Mika Zibanejad scored a crucial third-period goal, Igor Shesterkin made 29 saves and now the Rangers will venture to Tampa, Fla., for Games 3 and 4 with a 2-0 series lead in the Eastern Conference Final.

The Rangers are picking apart the defending back-to-back Stanley Cup champions. They are poking holes in a Stanley Cup-winning ship that has stayed afloat for two seasons. There is no rhyme or reason to it — the Rangers are simply outplaying the Lightning in every sense of the word.

“It’s a huge win for us, but we just get ready for the next one,” coach Gerard Gallant said.

It wasn’t a perfect day — Jameson Taillon fell six outs short of that — but it was pretty satisfying.

The Yankees’ long Thursday included a beat-down, a brush with history, dominant starting pitching and some dramatics.

Most importantly, the end result was two wins, 6-1 and 2-1, over the Angels in a split-admission doubleheader in The Bronx as the Yankees (36-15), who have the best record in baseball, swept a three-game series in impressive fashion.

Pinch-hitter Anthony Rizzo’s two-out, two-run single in the eighth inning of Game 2, after the Yankees had gone 0-for-10 with runners in scoring position, made a winner out of Taillon, who pitched seven perfect innings before finally allowing a hit, and then a run, in the eighth.

“I was fired up,” Taillon said. “It just felt like one of those nights where we were going to make it happen.”

The Mets believed they had tacked on another two-out run in the third inning when a Patrick Corbin sinker bore in on Luis Guillorme, appearing to strike his hand with the bases loaded. But upon the Nationals’ challenge, the call was overturned: The ball had drilled the handle of the bat.

And so on the next pitch, Guillorme calmly slapped a two-run single through the left side.

In a season in which the Mets have lost Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer for a significant chunk of time only for other pitchers to step up in their absences, even things that go wrong have ended up going right.

Behind yet another offensive explosion filled with timely hits and yet another step-up from an unexpected pitching source, the Mets continued to play the hammer to the nails in their division with a 10-0 destruction of the Nationals at Citi Field in front of 25,263 on Tuesday night for their season-high fifth straight victory.

The Mets (34-17) are a season-best 17 games over .500 and 18-7 against the NL East. The Mets now head west as their competition level gets cranked up against the Dodgers, Padres and Angels.