Rangers teammates St. Louis and Nash combined for the two fastest goals in team history

If you had blinked, you would have missed it.

Maybe that's what happened to the San Jose Sharks on this night in 2014.

Four seconds after Martin St. Louis scored a goal for the New York Rangers, the puck was back in the Sharks' net, courtesy of Rick Nash.

The game was played at Madison Square Garden. St. Louis scored on a scramble in the final minute of the second period to give the Rangers a 2-0 lead. The time of the goal was 19:16.

On the ensuing faceoff, New York's Dominic Moore pushed the puck ahead and Nash immediately swooped in from the right wing, poking it into the San Jose zone. It went between defensemen Matt Irwin and Justin Braun, toward goalie Alex Stalock.

Irwin and Braun both turned to follow the puck and appeared to not be aware that Nash was right there with them. Stalock saw him, but the puck was a little too far out of reach for him to be able to quickly decide how to react to the play - whether to sweep the puck away out of danger, or fall on it to get a whistle.

The goalie's indecisiveness, combined with the defensemen's inattention, caused him to weakly flail at the puck, nudging it back toward the oncoming Nash, who lifted Irwin's stick and poked the puck back at the net. Stalock, off-balance after his miss, left a gaping hole between his pads and the puck easily slipped through. The time of that goal was 19:20.

The result was a Rangers record for the two fastest goals, and also marked the first time that any team had scored four seconds apart under normal circumstances (i.e. not into an empty net) since Deron Quint of the original Winnipeg Jets singlehandedly did it in December 1995.

New York won the game 4-0.

Also on this date: 

1974 – Rick Hampton of the California Golden Seals and Grant Mulvey of the Chicago Black Hawks, became the youngest players since the end of the Second World War to score a goal in the NHL. Hampton was aged 18 years and 127 days when he scored for the Seals in their game in Montreal. Mulvey, aged 18 years and 32 days, bested Hampton’s achievement later that evening as the Hawks were playing in St. Louis, approximately two hours behind the Seals-Canadiens game.

1979 – The Edmonton Oilers won an NHL game for the first time, downing the Quebec Nordiques 6-3 on the strength of three goals by Blair MacDonald. Both teams, along with the Winnipeg Jets and the Hartford Whalers, were new to the NHL after the league merged with the World Hockey Association, and the Oilers were the last of the four clubs to get their first win. The Whalers had beaten the Los Angeles Kings earlier the same evening, and the Nords and Jets had both previously defeated the Colorado Rockies.

1980 – The Hawks retired Stan Mikita’s No. 21 in a ceremony at Chicago Stadium prior to their game against the Washington Capitals. Mikita had retired earlier that year after a stellar 22-year career that saw him score 541 goals and 1,467 points in a Hawks jersey. This marked the first time the Hawks had retired a player’s number.

1989 – Peter Stastny of the Quebec Nordiques reached 1,000 career points with an empty-net goal to seal a 5-3 victory over Chicago. Stastny became the 24^th NHL player to reach this milestone, and the first European-trained player to do so. (But not the first European-born player; that was Stan Mikita, born in Slovakia.) Stastny was at the time also the third-fastest player to get to 1,000 points, needing only 682 games. Wayne Gretzky (424) and Mike Bossy (656) had done it faster, and Mario Lemieux (513) later bumped Stastny down to fourth place.

1997 – Patrick Marleau of the San Jose Sharks scored his first NHL goal with 26 seconds left in his team’s 5-3 loss to the Phoenix Coyotes. Marleau, the second overall pick in the 1997 NHL Entry Draft, was 18 years and 34 days old, making him the youngest player to score in the NHL since Grant Mulvey exactly 23 years earlier.