All around him, there was deep disappointment and perhaps a measure of devastation in the visitors’ locker room. The first-place Rangers had just been eliminated from the 2012 playoffs by the upstart Devils in the sixth game of the conference finals on Adam Henrique’s overtime goal at the Rock.

This marked the end of the Black-and-Blueshirts, who had overachieved under head coach John Tortorella, finishing second overall in the NHL with 109 points before surviving the Senators and the Caps in a pair of seven-game series that enervated the squad.

There had been a demanding training camp. Then a demanding 82 games in the regular season and 20 more in the playoffs. They’d been grinding it out for eight months.

There was silence in the room, later occasionally punctuated by a handful of low-talking players being interviewed by the media.

Chris Kreider had been a Ranger for about 10 minutes. Maybe not quite, but you get the idea. Kreider actually had been a Ranger for exactly 46 days after signing his entry level contract on April 10. That was three days after the 19th-overall selection of the 2009 draft had led Boston College to the national championship in his junior season.

“I don’t think I could appreciate the depth of emotion guys were feeling,” No. 20 told The Post in advance of the first playoff Battle of the Hudson since that one 11 years ago. “Suggesting that it was as emotional for me would be disrespectful to those guys who had gone through it all. It was difficult for me to grasp the level of disappointment when it was over.

“Everyone says there are no passengers in a playoff run, but I jumped on the train after it left the station. I didn’t share the 82-game experience, I hadn’t been there with them.”

There was no guarantee Kreider would get into the lineup when he joined the team. He skated in practice for the first time on April 11, one day before the first round opened against Ottawa at the Garden. He was scratched from the first two games. But when Carl Hagelin was handed a three-game suspension for concussing Daniel Alfredsson with a Game 2 elbow, it opened a spot.

Tortorella had three choices to fill the hole that No. 62’s absence would create. One was slow-footed enforcer John Scott. Another was to move hybrid defenseman/forward Stu Bickel up from the back end while inserting Jeff Woywitka on the blue line.

Kreider, Scott and Woywitka all took warmups before Game 3 in Ottawa.

It was Kreider, of course, who got the call, inserted into Hagelin’s spot on the first line with Brad Richards in the middle and Marian Gaborik on the right. Heady company for the neophyte.

“I didn’t play with them again,” said Kreider, who played 11:11 over 13 shifts in the Blueshirts’ 1-0 victory. “I was racing around and going as hard as I could on every shift.

“I threw up between periods.”

The Rangers line combinations were volatile. The more things change and all that.

“You could see guys were used to it,” Kreider said. “If we needed a goal, he’d move one guy here and another guy there. If we were protecting a lead, he’d move different guys into different spots.”

Kreider remained in the lineup after Hagelin was reinstated because Brian Boyle had been knocked out of the series after being concussed by Chris Neil in Game 5.

The matchup with the Senators was as nasty a series as the Rangers have played in the salary-cap era, the club ultimately prevailing in seven games after falling behind 3-2 in the series following a Game 5 loss at the Garden.

It was Game 6 in Ottawa in which Kreider scored his first goal to give his team a 3-1 lead in the final minute of the second period to cap a three-goal burst. That became the winner in an eventual 3-2 victory.

The winger had played Game 4 with Brian Boyle and Brandon Prust, and then Game 5 with John Mitchell and Mike Rupp before joining forces with Derek Stepan and Ryan Callahan for Games 6 and 7.

“I remember thinking at the time that Rupper was the toughest guy I’d ever played with,” Kreider said. “There was nobody like that at school.”

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One of Kreider’s first pinch-me moments came in Game 4 of the second round in Washington, three days after the Blueshirts had grabbed a 2-1 series edge on Gaborik’s Game 3 triple-overtime winner.

“I didn’t have much energy,” said Kreider, who had played 26:17 in the match and was not alone among his teammates.

With Game 4 scoreless midway through the first period, Kreider tried to hit Boyle with a pass out of the zone.

“He came low and slow, and the pass was too far,” Kreider recalled. “Went right onto [Alex] Ovechkin’s stick and he just whipped it past Hank [Lundqvist] from about 50 feet.

“I felt awful. I never wanted to do anything to undermine these guys. I felt terrible when I made a mistake. But then I was on the bench and thought, ‘My first NHL assist.’ I looked out and I’m on the same ice with Ovechkin a few weeks after playing in college.

“Those times I was on the bench, I wanted to be out there, but I was thinking, ‘I’m in the NHL and playing in the playoffs.’”

I always have believed the Rangers lost their best chance at winning the Cup that year when they lost that Game 4 (3-2) in Washington and were dragged into a second consecutive seven-game series.

Had they taken out the Caps in five, they would have had some time to rest and prepare for the Devils, who had required 11 games to advance to the conference finals.

Instead, they were fatigued.

Kreider didn’t get off the bench all that much in Games 4, 5 and 6 against the Caps, getting 7:44, 6:57 and 6:06, respectively.

But he was reunited with Stepan and Callahan for Game 7 against Washington and the first four games of the conference finals in which he scored in each of the first three contests.

“I was going as hard as I could on the forecheck against the Devils every time I had an opportunity,” Kreider said. “But [Martin] Brodeur would go out from corner to corner to pick up the puck before it crossed the goal line and start them out.

“I was racing in and the puck was already gone. Their defense didn’t have to take many hits. I’d never seen anything like it. He was a one-man breakout.”

The Rangers gained a 2-1 series lead before losing the final three games, through which Kreider was blanked. In the final two games of the series, he played right wing on a line with Richards and Hagelin.

“I remember being surprised at how good the Devils were and how well they played,” Kreider said. “[Ilya] Kovalchuk, he was just unbelievable. [Zach] Parise was so good.”

Eighteen years after Brodeur had endured heartbreak in the epochal seven-game loss to the Rangers in the 1994 conference semis, the goaltender had twisted history his way.

Now, 11 years after that, it is Kreider seeking to turn things around.

Forty-two players competed in that series. Kreider is the lone survivor.

“Coming in the way I did and playing that year was an incredible experience,” said Kreider, who recorded five goals and two assists in 18 games. “It was a whirlwind. Everybody treated me so well.

“There are times when it still seems unreal.”