The Final Scene

The sights and sounds when a season ends

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Contributions from Brendan Burke, Stan Fischler, Chris King, and Jiggs McDonald.

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Good Morning, Islanders Country.

All good things end come to an end, and so do maddening, frustrating, and befuddling things, like the 2022-23 New York Islanders season.

It’s a strange feeling knowing this team never showed you enough to make you believe they could go far but still be deeply disappointed at how early their exit was this postseason. I didn’t know exactly how to feel when this strange season came to an end, and I don’t know how to feel about where the franchise goes from here moving forward - at least not yet.

As I shuffled out of UBS Arena, I looked around at the faces of fans not yet ready to leave their seats. Some young, some old, all still contemplating how it all ended so quickly in the cruel way only playoff hockey can deliver. One second, your Stanley Cup dreams are alive; the next, a sharp-angle shot from a veteran fouth-liner somehow ends up in the net against your elite goaltender.

The crowd gasps, then falls silent, so quiet that all you hear are the celebrating Carolina players on the ice until the game-ending music can drown it out. Ilya Sorokin’s teammates come over to console him and there are those in the stands that also look like they can also use a hug.

You don’t want to look but can’t look away as the handshake lines form with your team on the wrong side of it. Some fans threw their orange towels onto the ice in disgust, others joined in a smattering of applause as the players, led by captain Anders Lee shyly raised their hockey sticks at center ice to salute their fans.

From there, I walked out down the stairs and out the team’s palace of a building, one I fall more in love with after every visit, and between the sound of raindrops, listened to the murmuring conversations from the Isles Faithful about what went wrong tonight, during the season and where the organization goes from here.

There was one young boy, no older than 4 or 5, being held in his mother’s arms. He looked up and said, “shitty ending!” We couldn’t help but laugh. Get used to it, kid! He was then even asked to repeat it for his “nonno.”

As we walk alongside the Belmont race track, I saw Mike Carver in his trademark orange blazer and Devin Robinson of Yes Men Outfitters walking side-by-side. Other faces I recognized from seeing at games or on social media. For so many of us, when the season ends, the relationships we’ve built around this team are put on pause. It’s more than a hockey season that ends. Your Isles family goes its separate ways until we all meet again to do it again come October.

Back in my car, with a 45-minute traffic jam to get out and an hour drive back to Connecticut awaiting me, I listen to the post-game show with Chris King and Greg Picker. Players talk about how this will “sting” for a while and how close the series was - which is undoubtedly true. They’ve been on the other side of these series that can break either way; this time, it’s the Isles that go home.

When they get to Lee, the Islanders captain calls this group “special” and says that there is an unwavering belief in each other. He says this latest disappointment is just part of their journey to achieve their ultimate goal.

It’s an idealistic sentiment, but one that is hard to buy into right now.

You want to believe that moments like these will make winning the Stanley Cup all that much sweeter, but sometimes the end really is the end, and you’ve already experienced the best it’s ever going to be. It’s certain that change is coming because it always does; we just don’t know how much. The days and weeks that follow will start to offer signs of what’s to come or not to come.

One thing that won’t change is that come next season, and the seasons that follow, we’ll be right back where we started from - back in front of our TVs and in our seats, ready for another Islanders season.

And when the circumstances are the same as they were last night, there we’ll be, dressed in our finest orange and blue outfits, expecting a better outcome and hoping for a different set of final scenes that will last in our memories a whole lot longer than the ones on Friday night.

That’s all for today.

We’ll have more during the week.

- JB

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And we leave you with this…congrats to our friend Shannon Hogan and the expansion of her family and Isles Nation.

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