“I look at goalies today, and they are so balanced mentally,” said Gilles Gratton, a goalie for the Rangers and the St. Louis Blues who was widely considered the craziest of his time.

Gratton, who played for the Rangers in 1976-77, told people he was reincarnated and had once been a soldier in the Spanish Inquisition. He refused to play when the moon was in the wrong part of the sky. Now, he watches Montreal games on television and marvels at the Canadiens’ Cristobal Huet.

“Huet is so cool, so balanced,” Gratton said. “Of course, he has 46 coaches to help him.”

The truly wacky stories came from the 1960s and 70s, when legends like Montreal’s Jacques Plante knitted in the locker room and Glenn Hall threw up before games and Gary Smith had to shower between every period. Gump Worsley, a longtime goalie for the Rangers and other teams, once said, “The only job worse is a javelin catcher at a track-and-field meet.”

Subsequent generations took steps down the wackiness scale to the point of blending in almost seamlessly.

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“Now you can see all the young guys are really cool,” the Devils’ Martin Brodeur said. “Nobody is really head cases. You still have some, but it’s not as bad as it used to be when I started 13, 14 years ago.”

Brodeur was one of the earliest nonneurotic goaltenders. He was known for his talkative nature and his ability to shrug off goals, but now he looks around at a league populated with boy-next-door types, like Cam Ward of Carolina and Kari Lehtonen of Atlanta.

Henrik Lundqvist is among the most affable of the Rangers. He jokes with his teammates, joins them on charity outings and stands out only because fans are crazy about him.

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A few quirky goalies remain, led by Detroit’s peripatetic Dominik Hasek and Florida’s moody Ed Belfour.

Brodeur said Patrick Roy, the N.H.L.’s career victories leader, helped the sport realize how important goalies were by leading two run-of-the-mill Montreal teams to Stanley Cups before winning another in Colorado. Even so, Roy’s quirks were so famous he once made a tongue-in-cheek commercial about talking to his goalposts. He refused to skate over any lines on the ice — he had to step over them — and had a litany of pregame rituals.

Some goalies still meditate or follow routines, but most agree the real strangeness has disappeared because they have something the old-schoolers never did: coaching.

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“Now, if you let in a goal, they show the psychologist behind you. The goalie coach and you go and watch video and fix your mistake,” Gratton said. “The only thing I ever heard was, ‘Stand up and stop the puck.’ ”

Goalie coaches became standard in the N.H.L. in the 1980s, and they have worked their way into younger levels of the sport. Almost all teach the butterfly style popularized by Roy, and they have formed a support system for their pupils.

The Rangers’ two goalies, Lundqvist and Kevin Weekes, get together every morning with the goalie coach Benoit Allaire to talk about what happened in the league the night before. Allaire often shows them video clips and points out elements of the game for them to concentrate on in practice.

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When things are not going well, they can also turn to the Rangers’ mental skills coach, John Phelan, to talk through their issues.

“In the old days, they had only one goalie, so it was even worse,” said Darren Eliot, a former N.H.L. goalie and now a television analyst. “At least I had someone to share the burden with. Hey, I was glad I played in an era where at least we wore face masks.”

As they have learned to lean on coaches, goalies have also begun to try to shrink the gap between them and the rest of their teammates, a space once enforced by unwritten rules. It helped that goalies became better athletes.

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“When you’re the last line of defense, sometimes you’re going to get put on an island,” said John Vanbiesbrouck, who played for five teams from 1983-2002, including the Rangers, the Islanders and the Devils. “You have to build a bridge to your teammates. I think you see goalies that isolate themselves find themselves with short careers now.”

That is a lesson that the youngest N.H.L. goalies seem to have learned. Many, like Lundqvist, who is from Sweden, grew up oblivious to the lore of the cordoned-off goalie. Lundqvist said it was second nature to reach out to teammates.

“There are a lot of different people in this locker room from all over the world, and it’s a great mix,” he said. “We have a lot of fun. When you’re out there on the ice, it’s a lot about trust. They’ve got to trust the goalie. You have to trust them. When teams and goalies play the best, you can tell they trust each other.”

That neurosis-free interaction seems like heaven to Gratton, who said his nuttiness stemmed from depression. He quit the game at age 24, spent three years at ashrams in India and the next 20 or so moving around Europe. Now, he is back in Quebec, working for Classic Auctions, which specializes in hockey memorabilia.

Despite having played only a handful of seasons, Gratton stuck in fans’ hearts. He said he still received four or five letters a week asking for an autograph or picture.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “It’s my past. I was the crazy goalie.”

He added: “Being left alone, not knowing what to do, a lot of us went off the deep end. I guess I was the weirdest of all. I think I did it just to put the pressure off.”

The pressure remains, but the quirks have faded and the oddballs have largely disappeared. The goalposts are on their own.