Jeff Larmer, Kitchener Rangers’ practical joker and all-star winger, always seems to enjoy himself on or off the ice.
     He had more fun than usual Friday, wrestling teammate Mike Moher in the afternoon and throwing Windsor Spitfires over his shoulder at night.
     Larmer triggered four goals for the second time this year as the Rangers romped 7-3 before a season-high Auditorium crowd of 6,495 to take a 6-0 lead in the eight-point Ontario Hockey League Emms Division semifinal playoff.
     Without question the superior team, the Rangers can clinch the series Sunday night in Windsor where the Rangers have swept all four games this year.
     The Rangers now have won eight straight against the Spits after losing the season opener and have outscored them 13-4 and outshot them 141-74 in the three playoff matches.
     “Tonight was a big game,” Larmer said back to Windsor with them having a chance to tie the series.”
     Larmer almost single-handedly saw to that.  He fired two goals in the first period to send the Rangers ahead 2-1, added his third at 11:31 of the second period to make it 4-2 and completed his masterpiece at 8:19 of the third.
     “I was thinking about the game all day,” Larmer said.
     “I had nothing else to do.  I was just laying around the apartment until Moe (Moher) came home.  I kidded him about his 20th birthday and we had a little wrestle.  It lasted about 30 seconds – the time it took for him to throw me down.  But I think I could have taken him if it would have been two falls out of three!”
     Larmer, who couldn’t win two out of 200 falls against Moher, is a scorer, not a fighter.
     The third-year veteran led the Rangers last year with 54 goals and led them again this season with 51 in 49 games.  He probably would have shattered the team’s single-season record of 60 goals – set by Dwight Foster in 1976-77 – had he played most of the 68 games.
     He missed a dozen matches because of an NHL tryout with the Colorado Rockies – with whom he play eight games – and seven others because of shoulder and knee injuries.
     Larmer, who scored single goals in the first two playoff contests, is the king of dipsy-doodle in the OHL.  Even when he skates in a straight line he seems to go in 10 directions.  His jerks, leaps, whirl-arounds, stops and starts and fancy-dan stickhandling – much of it done with a comical assortment of facial expressions – make him a hard man to stop when he darts down the ice.
     His final goal Friday had a bit of everything.  He lost the puck at his own blueline, picked it up again and zipped down the left wing.  He faked a slapshot, deked past the fooled defenceman.  As the puck squirted loose, Larmer whriled in the slot, got his stick on the puck again and backhanded it home.
     Other Kitchener goals went to Mike Eagles, John Tucker, and Louis Crawford.  Eagles, Kevin Casey, Grant Martin, and Al MacInnis each picked up two assists.
     Paul Lawless, Todd Hooey, and Jim Olsson scored for the Spits, who trailed 2-1 and 5-3 by periods and were outshot 50-24.
     “I think our strongest point is our defensive play as a team,” said Ranger defenceman Joel Levesque, who creamed several Spits with body checks.
      “We’re trying to keep the other team to three goals or less.  If we can do that we’ve got enough firepower to win.  It’s the same thing we tried to do last year (when the Rangers reached the Memorial Cup final) and we’ve carried it over into this year.  It seems like a pretty good philosophy, wouldn’t you say?”
     The Spits couldn’t argue with that.