The long road to stay home
By Cory Wright
Part of the lore of Nassau Coliseum was how the building would literally shake when at capacity. The low ceiling and tight confines funneled the sounds of passionate screaming fans down to the ice – and the players could hear and feel the reverberations while waiting in the locker room.
"It shakes alright," Matt Martin said back in 2018. "You're a little worried it's coming down. It's the best. That's really all I can say. It's really the best building I've ever played in."
There’s usually some hyperbole and exaggeration when players say a building shakes, but on Dec. 1, 2018, the Coliseum actually did shake, with fans banging on the glass so hard during warmups that one of the stanchions popped out onto the ice in the Islanders’ zone. Cal Clutterbuck picked it up and held it triumphantly above his head like a Roman gladiator, much to the delight of the fans in attendance, who formed a crowd 10 rows deep during warmups.
That set the tone for the rest of the night, as the Islanders essentially held a hootenanny in their return to Old Barn, using the energy in the building to fuel a 3-2 comeback win over the Columbus Blue Jackets. After three-and-a-half years since their last regular season game on Long Island, Islanders fans were ready to unleash their bottled up emotions.
"That kind of energy wins you hockey games," captain Anders Lee said.
Casey Cizikas, who played hero that evening with the game-wining goal, said it best, “These points are as much theirs as they are ours.”
Tenured veterans knew to expect the noise and emotion from a Coliseum crowd, but for a new wave of Islanders, it was an eye-opening experience. Anthony Beauvillier said he had “goosebumps” during the anthem, when the building sang the Star-Spangled Banner in unison.
Between the result and the atmosphere, the return to Nassau Coliseum set the tone for the next two-and-a-half seasons on Hempstead Turnpike. The Islanders went 46-19-8 in their swan song in their original – but slightly updated – home, reviving the spirit of Fort Neverlose. They closed the Coliseum on a high note, with a lengthy playoff run in 2021, and even beat the rival Rangers in the final meeting in the building, righting a wrong from 2015. Albeit on borrowed time, the Coliseum was given a second life on that cold December night – and it was one well lived.
That all officially started with the return on Dec. 1, 2018. Brendan Burke, the Islanders TV Play-by-Play broadcaster, said in his opening soliloquy that the concept of home hadn’t been an easy one for the nomadic Islanders during the Brooklyn years, but to Islanders fans, that’s what the Coliseum represented. Really, it was a chance to say goodbye to a childhood home. A new one was about to be built down the block.