NEW YORK — Down three goals in the first period is a recipe for a long night for many teams. For the Dallas Stars, it was a recipe for resilience. After Alexis Lafreniere and Vincent Trocheck combined to get the New York Rangers up big early in the first 11 minutes and 24 seconds, the Stars rallied back to win their fifth straight game, using an overtime power play goal from Jamie Benn to cap off a wild 5-4 win at Madison Square Garden. The win put them into sole possession of the third and final playoff spot in the Central Division, and was something of a hallmark showing for a group where the window to win a Stanley Cup remains very much so open after falling short in last year’s Western Conference Final. It isn’t so much the embarrassment of riches they’ve managed to piece together in terms of skilled players as it is the mentality of the group as a whole. There was no panic on Tuesday night getting down early on the road, just confidence. Nothing needed to be said to right the ship, with an understanding that it wasn’t really sinking to begin with despite what the scoreboard said. “I think it depends on how you’re down, so with the way we were playing, I don’t think anything needed to be said,” said Stars head coach Pete DeBoer. “It was just ‘stick with it, this’ll turn for us if we keep doing what we’re doing.’ I think everyone felt that we were playing better than the score was showing … showed a lot of character and guts down 3-0 on the road. I thought we didn’t panic. We stuck with it. I don’t think it was a 3-0 deserved deficit, but that was the hole we were in. We just kept battling, kept chipping away. When they scored the fourth it would have been easy to go, ‘it’s just not our night,’ but we kept coming again. Important two points.” Veteran forward Matt Duchene, who scored a critical goal just 93 seconds after Lafreniere potted his second to start the comeback, echoed similar sentiments. “We don’t get too high, don’t get low,” he said. “I mean, it was 3-0 and it was kind of like, ‘geez how is this 3-0, we’re playing pretty well.’ We got a fortunate bounce on mine, and then a nice play on the power play and it’s 3-2. You come into the room and scored two goals … offense has been hard to come by at times this year, so it was nice to get two. We kind of just focused on that and kept it rolling. We talked about if we played 40 (minutes) like that we’d probably win the game. It took a little bit more than another 40 after that, but we got it done.”