Good Morning, Islanders Country.
There’s always the game after.
The one that tells you, in some ways, far more than the one that came before it.
The Islanders learned that lesson the moment the horn sounded on a historic 9–0 demolition of the Devils at UBS Arena — a night so absurd it barely felt real. Records fell. Everything went in. The building buzzed like it was May, not January. And then, almost immediately, reality tapped everyone on the shoulder and whispered: Now what?
Now comes Nashville.
Now comes the road.
Now comes the part that actually matters.
“Let’s be fair,” Mathew Barzal said afterward, cutting through the euphoria with the kind of honesty teams need in moments like that. “The team we played tonight, obviously not the New Jersey Devils. They’re better than that. But when you have those nights, you have to take them.”
Exactly. You take them. You enjoy them. And then you move on.
Because the Islanders can’t afford to get full of themselves — not even for a shift. They’re still the same team that usually sweats to score three goals. The same team whose power play, without Bo Horvat, has too often looked like it’s searching for instructions. The same team that knows, deep down, its margin for error is thin, and its safety net is stitched together by elite goaltending.
That’s why the game after matters.
