I had a rather heated conversation on twitter a few days ago with someone who was upset that the New York Islanders now have an Official Tattoo Parlor. That’s right, a tattoo parlor - Tattoo Lou’s - is now a sponsor of an NHL team and they will set up a booth right inside the Nassau Coliseum.

The guy I had this conversation with (I don’t know him personally) was livid about the whole tattoo thing. He’s no longer taking his young daughters to Islander games. Because with the addition of a tattoo sponsor, he says Isles games are no longer family friendly.

The gist of my questions to him went like this: So, the beer ads, the bar sponsorships, the Ice Girls shaking their asses, the t-shirt throwing young women with their in-your-face cleavage and the fighting on the ice and in the stands were all fine family friendly entertainment until they had the nerve to add a tattoo shop to the lobby?

Apparently, yes. All of the other stuff was fine, but it’s the tattoos that are going to send the wrong message to his daughters. So he’s boycotting the Islander games this year. And I’m sure he’s writing a strongly worded letter to the team to let him know they have lost a valued customer because of their silly insistence on doing something new to get the average consumer of Islanders hockey - that being a male in his late 20s and not ten year old girls - to spend more money at the Coliseum. I’m sure they will take his complaint to heart. 

Sports arenas and stadiums have come a long way from the days when you’d get to the game, buy a hot dog, watch the game and leave. They are entertainment complexes now. The food courts alone are destinations where you could spend an entire day sampling foods from sushi to pulled pork to deep fried anything. There are picnic areas, interactive entertainment, a hundred things to do besides watch the game. 

Is having a tattoo booth in the lobby of an arena any different or worse than having a full service bar in the lobby? Can you fault the team for trying to do something new or innovative to draw the fans in? Sure, they’re not drawing them into the game itself but once you’ve paid for their ticket management is less concerned about you actually watching the event than spending money at their concessions. For all they care, you could watch one inning of a baseball game and spend the others forking over cash to eat tacos, have your picture taken with a mascot, buying souvenirs or go on rides. The game is almost incidental to your stadium experience in the eyes of marketing executives.

That’s not say I think addition of a tattoo booth to the Nassau Coliseum is the greatest idea in the world. I have nothing against tattoos - my daughter and boyfriend combined have more ink than the Sunday New York Times - but I do have something about the Islanders suddenly coming up with ideas to add more fun and excitement to game nights when they’re just going to be leaving us in a couple of years. It’s like your girlfriend getting a boob job right before she dumps you. 

Ok, maybe a bad boob job. Because the Islander flash you can choose from is pretty damn hokey. I’m surprised you can’t choose a piece that has the words to Billy Joel’s “Downeaster Alexa” scrawled over the old fishsticks logo. 

Maybe the guy I was talking to on twitter is right. Maybe the tattoo thing is a bad idea. Lord knows there are enough young people walking around Long Island with regrettable tattoos. It’s sad to imagine a future Long Island where hundreds of hockey fans are walking around with flaming puck tattoos honoring a team that doesn’t even exist anymore. Tattoos are permanent. Sports teams are not.

I’m going to skip past the tattoo booth opening night as I make my way to the sushi bar between periods. Not because I don’t like it. I’m just holding out on the tattoo thing until they open a booth at Yankee Stadium. Because I know they’ll never leave me.

The New York Islanders all but left town last night. Their contract runs until 2015 and after that they will surely leave but in the hearts and minds of Islander fans, they’re already gone. We’re preparing for a funeral that is going to be four years in the making. 

The voters of Nassau County made it clear. Their partisan politics got in the way of facts and figures and reality and the majority of residents - at least those who bothered to come out and vote - gave the New York Islanders the finger while they cast those votes. They don’t want hockey here. They don’t want the Coliseum. They don’t want to better their community. There’s no other conclusion I can draw for this. 

This is a sports blog and I won’t bother you with the economic fallout of this vote. My anger is over here. My sadness, it’s right here. My sadness is for my hockey team. 

I cried before I went to sleep last night. I sat in front of my computer and watched the twitter stream of my fellow hockey fans as we all found out the results together and I cried. No matter what happens with the Coliseum, no matter what they decided to do with that land now, the Islanders are going to leave. 

They haven’t been such a great team lately. But they’re getting better. So much better. Watching them grow into a playoff team has been exciting. Watching the young players, knowing they are going to lead the team to future greatness, that’s such a tremendous part of being a sports fan. And they’re going to have to do it with this team. Because what player is going to sign with the Islanders now that their future is so up in the air? This is our team. This is the team that’s going to carry us for the next four years as we prepare to say goodbye. Now with each game, with each win, with each step toward regaining the power they once held over the NHL, there will be a pervasive sadness to go along with the cheers. Every fan who sits down to watch a game in the Nassau Coliseum will be thinking the same thought: This is all going to be gone.

Those banners hanging from the rafters? The four Stanley Cup banners, the conference banners and division banners, the banners with names like Bossy, Gillies, Nystrom and Smith? They will be hanging somewhere else. Maybe Quebec. Maybe Kansas City. Maybe even just next door in Brooklyn. Wherever those banners hang, even if that place is still in New York, it won’t look right. It won’t feel right. Those championships were born and raised on Long Island. Those Stanley Cups were fought for in the Nassau Coliseum. Those banners belong to us, the fans, as much as they belong to the team. To think of those blue and orange numbers hanging from the rafters in a Quebec arena is heartbreaking.

There’s a sticker on the back of my car that says “We’re all Islanders.” I wish everyone felt that way. I wish the people who went to the polls last night to vote no thought of us as a community rather than a bunch of disparate towns whose people are only brought together by identity politics. Maybe they don’t remember the parades down Hempstead Turnpike. Maybe they don’t remember the pride of being home to an NHL dynasty. Maybe they forgot that the centerpiece of the team’s uniform is a picture of Long Island. We’re all Islanders. Don’t we all want what’s best for our communities? Perhaps not.

So how do you root for a team that you know is going to leave you? Four lame duck seasons of hockey - seasons in which the team will only get better and better - is going to feel like a pretty long funeral march. It’s not even just the team. How do we say goodbye to hockey? What is fall and winter without the skates hitting the ice, without the red lights, the air horns, the sound of boards rattling, the cursing of lost power play opportunities, the high fives? I can’t imagine greeting October without the anticipation of seeing my favorite hockey team on the ice. The Coliseum - if it still stands - will certainly live up to its nickname of the The Mausoleum. The closer it gets to 2015 and the end of the Islanders lease, the more it will feel like a burial ground. Each game, each season will bring us closer to saying goodbye to part of our lives. To the game, to the team, to the banners that hang from the rafters.

In about two years, I’ll probably be moving from Long Island to Northern California (so, how are those Sharks looking?). I was going to say goodbye to the Islanders and the Coliseum anyway, but on my own terms. I’ll come back to visit them in 2015 for their farewell tour. I’ll wear my Islanders jersey and feel at home in the Coliseum because that place - no matter how crappy it may be on the inside - always feels like home. I’ll say my proper farewells and go back to California with “We’re all Islanders” tattooed on my heart. Because this team - the one that plays in Nassau County and not one that will play in any other place - will always be mine. 

[photo: Jim McIsaac, Getty Images]

I took this picture in 1983 at a parade honoring the Stanley Cup Champion New York Islanders. I want to be able to take a picture like this again. I want another moment just like this one.

Tomorrow, we find out if that opportunity will ever come.

Tomorrow is Election Day in Nassau County. It’s Election Day for hockey. Election Day for the New York Islanders.

Tomorrow, the voters of Nassau County decide the fate of the Islanders and their future here.

I’ve spent a lot of time the past few months being a bit evangelical about this. I’ve campaigned, I’ve lectured, I’ve fought and I’ve talked to anyone who would listen about how this is about more than hockey. It’s about quality of life. 

But here, among sports fans, I can talk about the hockey.

The Islanders have played in the Nassau Coliseum since 1972. That’s all but ten years of my life. They are part of my Long Island heritage. They are part of my life. For 39 years, the team has played professional hockey practically in my backyard. I could get in my car fifteen minutes before game time and be in my seat with a pretzel and Coke before the puck drops. 

For four years, I had a hockey dynasty playing five minutes from my house. For 39 years, the hockey team I love has known no home but the Nassau Coliseum. And now they are in danger of losing that home. Their fate partly lies in the hand of people who don’t care about hockey, who don’t care about Stanley Cups or local team pride.

Yes, it’s about more than hockey. But the hockey part is what’s going to hurt first if the vote doesn’t pass. I’ll deal with the quality of life thing later. I’ll deal with the domino effect of closing businesses in my neighborhood later. But I don’t know how I’ll deal with no hockey. I don’t know how I’ll spend the next three seasons watching a rising, hopeful team knowing they’re going to leave in 2015.

I want to see another Stanley Cup parade on Long Island. I want to drive past the Nassau Coliseum every day on my way to work, look at it with pride and say “That’s where my team plays.” I want to continue going to games, cheering for my team, wearing the jersey with Long Island on it.

That’s why I’ll be at my polling place most of the day tomorrow (at least 100 feet away, of course) handing out literature, educating the fence-sitters and maybe getting into a few heated arguments with the opposition.

You can try to take my hockey team from me, but I won’t let you do it without a fight.

At least it’s not a fisherman.

That was my response to the unveiling of the new Winnipeg Jets logo. I was hoping they would do the same with the logo as they did with the team name; go back to the original, the classic. But, no. The logo and alternates are just some marketing president’s mashup of branding, modernization and…well to be honest it looks like an airplane getting it on with a maple leaf. Sexy.

But at least they can say it’s not the worst logo ever. Their uniforms will probably not go down in history with likes of the 80s Astros, the 1976 White Sox or the 80s Denver Nuggets as disgraces to their sports. There have been dozens of uniforms over time that have made fans less than happy to wear team jerseys and logos (Mighty Ducks, Portland Trailblazers) that had to put a dent in profits of the team store but there is probably no logo change as storied and horrifying as that of the 1995 New York Islanders.

The Islanders - who play on an island as you may have guessed - had been represented on their jerseys by a logo whose main symbol was…wait for it…an island. Long Island, to be exact. You know, where they play. This was a good logo. The “Y” in “NY” was a hockey stick and everything you needed to know about the team was right there: We are a hockey team and we play on Long Island, in New York. 

Somewhere in the offices of the Nassau Coliseum in the mid-90s, some management type person put pen to paper and started writing out ideas for changing the team around. “Hmm, we finished in the basement this season. What can we do to make better things happen? Make some trades? Fire the coach? Oust the GM? I know! We’ll let our leading scorer slip from our hands and then we’ll change the team’s logo!” 

At the subsequent Team Logo Change Meeting (and I’m conjecturing all this, work with me here), the management and the marketing department and the sales department and maybe a few peanut vendors and the team mascot had a brainstorming session about new logos. 

“What would represent Long Island the best?”
“Well….an island would, and we already….”
“CAN’T YOU SEE THAT LOGO IS MAKING US LOSE?”

And so it was decided that a fisherman would adorn the jerseys of the New York Islanders starting the next season. Not just any fisherman. An angry fisherman. A fisherman who looked like he was about to whack someone with his hockey stick. Perhaps he was angry because he had no legs.

“Well,” someone surely said, “representing the Bay fishermen is a nice touch and all, but Long Island is so much more than fishing, in fact…”
“Nonsense! Billy Joel wrote a song about the Bay fishermen so it must be a thing! A big thing!”

And then they added some teal to the logo because sports teams in the 90s love their teal and then they tweaked the fisherman and his fishing gear and voila! Instant hockey success!

“Hey, guys? This dude looks kind of like the Gorton’s fisherman.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who are you, anyway? Aren’t you the guy who sells peanuts in section 312? Why am I listening to you?”

So the new logo came to be and in the first game against the rival New York Rangers the Ranger fans chanted “We want fishsticks!” and somewhere out there, a peanut vendor shook his head sadly.

The backlash was immediate and immense. Islander fans stormed the team’s office with pitchforks and torches, demanding death to those responsible. Well, we wrote strongly worded letters and shouted “Maloney sucks” at games. Pitchforks are expensive, people. 

In the end, the logo worked no magic. The team finished in last place again and became the laughing stock of the sports world. Management decided to revert back to the old logo immediately and the league said “Too bad. You’re stuck as The New York Fishsticks for another season.”

The team certainly earned a place in a dubious sort of history, though. When people rattle off a list of worst sports uniforms ever, the New York Islanders rank right up there with the Astros, Canucks, Padres, Raptors and White Sox. If you can’t be good at being good, you might as well be good at being the worst, right?

Long may you run, traditional Islanders logo. Or at least until you potentially leave us in 2015.

On a hot summer night, over 5,000 people showed up at the Nassau Coliseum to watch a game that belongs to winter. 

What would make all those people spend a Saturday night in July watching a hockey scrimmage between New York Islanders’ prospects?

Hope.

Hope is the energy that fuels the off-season. Hope is what keeps fans tethered to their favorite sports between the championship game and opening day. Hope is what makes us clutch our season tickets like a security blanket.

As sports fans, we dream big. We always dream big. Even if our team finishes in last place, we spend the off-season daydreaming of scenarios in which our team rises from basement to first place. We go to sleep with visions of championships dancing in our head. Because in the off-season, anything is possible. 

Those prospects look good, don’t they? Those young guys will bring a much needed spark to the team. The draft picks, the trades, the free agents signed, the guys claimed off waivers. Any one of those players could end up being the missing piece to the puzzle, the guy who brings the team together and propels them on to victory. We scour the newspapers and websites looking for hints of greatness at training camp, looking for words of hope and encouragement from our favorite players. 

Whether our favorite teams are winners or we’re fans of a struggling franchise, we dream. We hope for even more wins, more records, more streaks, another title. We hope for more things to cheer about, more reasons to sit in the stands.

The hope of the off-season is what makes 5,000 people turn up for a hockey scrimmage in July. We see on the ice the future of our team and for a little while, we can imagine another banner hanging from the rafters of the arena. We look at those kids on the ice and imagine them carrying the Stanley Cup while we cheer them from the very seats in which we watched them play on a summer night.

We can dream, can’t we?

On January 24, 1981 I was sitting in the Nassau Coliseum - section 315 - watching history unfold. The New York Islanders were playing their 50th game of the season and right winger Mike Bossy had 48 goals coming into the game. He needed two goals that night to become only the second player in NHL history to score 50 goals in 50 games. I was there to watch one of my favorite hockey players enter the record books alongside Maurice Richard, one of the greatest hockey players ever.

Bossy didn’t even get a shot on goal the first two periods. Almost sixteen minutes into the third period, he scored his 49th. He had four minutes left to achieve the 50 in 50. With a minute and a half left in the game, he took a perfect pass from Bryan Trottier and shot the puck past Quebec Nordiques goalie Ron Grahame. 15,000 fans went crazy. The team greeted Bossy out on the ice. It was pandemonium for a few minutes while we all celebrated Bossy’s feat together.

Oh, yea. The Islanders won 7-4. In all the excitement over Bossy’s goal, we nearly forgot a game was played and won. For a moment, those two points in the standing didn’t mean as much as Mike Bossy’s name in the record books.

Later that night I had a lengthy discussion with some sports fans about the glorifying of individual achievements over team achievements in sports. 30 years later (my god, I just dated myself) I had nearly the same conversation with different sports fans after Derek Jeter got his 3,000th hit.

Some of those fans think because the four major league sports - baseball, football, basketball and yes, hockey (and notice the absence of the belated Oxford comma there) - are team sports the team achievements should be given more attention than the personal ones. 

But let’s face it. Besides winning the league’s championship, other team achievements -winning streaks, points scored in a game, wins in a season - are a cumulative thing that aren’t nearly as climatic as individual goals. I’m thinking it was more exciting to watch Bossy get that 50th goal than it would have been to be there when the team broke the record for longest playoff series winning streak. We cheer the teams, but we love the individuals. We don’t just wear a Boston Bruins jersey. We wear one with a name and number on the back. We don’t collect team baseball cards. We treasure the cards of our favorite players. 

The fact that we identify with individual players is why Derek Jeter’s accomplishment is so fascinating to us. It’s why Wilt Chamberlin’s 100 points is still talked about. Identifying with or cheering on specific players personalizes a sport for fans.

One of the things I was asked about both 30 years ago and last night was if it is detrimental to sports to put so much emphasis on personal achievement. Glorifying players, putting them on pedestals, honoring their success as individuals rather than as part of team can certainly backfire when the players we honor or call heroes end up letting us down. But overall, I think it’s a good thing. It adds excitement to a long season. It gives us something to root for when our teams aren’t doing that well. It makes us feel a connection with the players whose jerseys we wear. You can be a fan of the sport, a fan of a team and a fan of a particular player all at once. Cheering on Jeter or anyone else going for a record is also, by extension, cheering for the sport. 

That night in the Coliseum remains one of my favorite sports memories. Even though I later attended a game where the Islanders won the Stanley Cup, watching Bossy achieve that 50 goals in 50 games landmark felt like a more personal moment, like I was cheering on a friend. 

You know what’s worse than a breakup? An impending breakup. The kind of breakup where you spend your entire existence wondering if the love of your life is getting ready to leave you. It’s been threatened. It’s been talked about. Ultimatums have been given. It’s all about to come to a head. 

And that’s where Long Island hockey fans are at right now with the Islanders. On August 1st, residents of Nassau County will go to the ballot to determine if we want to give the County and team owner Charles Wang enough money to rebuild the Nassau Coliseum and turn the surrounding area into a sports/entertainment complex, thus keeping the Islanders here for the foreseeable future instead of having them run for the hills when their lease expires in three years. 

It’s a complicated deal but one that mostly puts the financial burden on Wang. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy the past few weeks telling my fellow Nassau County residents that it’s not just about hockey, that a vote for the Islanders is a vote for their community. I’ve hammered home the point that if the Islanders go, the Coliseum goes and then the surrounding business community dies. I’ve tried to make it less about hockey and more about “it’s the economy, stupid” because that’s what anyone who is not a hockey fan will understand.

But make no mistake, it is very much about the hockey for most of us. We’ve got 39 years invested in this team. For the younger fans, they can say they’ve been Islander fans their whole lives. We’ve been together through ups and downs, through a misguided logo change, through glory days and the “dynasty” tag, through years that left us wondering why we torture ourselves with this relationship. We’ve maintained our ties with the team through bad management and horrible trades and we’ve come out to see our team play in what is probably the most awful arena in all of sports. The only thing that saves the Nassau Coliseum from being the most depressing sports place on the planet is those four Stanley Cup banners hanging from the rafters and even then, sometimes those banners are just a sad reminder of what used to be.

We’re on the brink of the end of our relationship. It’s a sad, heartbreaking thing. Ask any fan of any sport whose team has left them what it feels like. From the Brooklyn Dodgers to the Seattle Supersonics, from the Quebec Nordiques to the Cleveland Browns, there are fans all across North America who can tell you about the heartbreak of your favorite team abandoning you for another city. A prettier city. A city who can give them more of what they’re looking for. A city that will provide a more rewarding relationship. Ask a Baltimore Colts fan what it’s like. That’s the stuff earnest young men in black rimmed glasses with acoustic guitars write hit songs about. 

So of course it’s about the hockey as well as the well being of our neighborhood. There are people screaming in opposition about the $58.00 a year our property taxes will go up if this vote is passed and I get that, I do. We’re one of the highest taxed counties in the nation (our average annual property tax is $8,306) already. But $58.00 a year to save your hockey team? That’s too much to ask? I don’t know how else to put it to these people. I’ve explained about the economic impact of the team leaving and the Coliseum closing down. Now I’m just trying to appeal to their emotions. I’ve become a lovelorn teenager writing poorly written MySpace posts about love and loss and the empty, black space that will envelop my heart when I’m left alone with nothing but my memories. My pleas to vote “yes” have become nothing more than a Dashboard Confessional song where hockey is the one who got away. 

I love hockey. I love my Islanders. This team is part of my history, my lifeline, my entire being and our 39 year relationship is out of my hands. I’ve done what I can to keep us together and the rest of this will play out like an episode of Intervention, where you’re watching a bunch of people who think they know what’s good for everyone decided the fate of your lover. “I’m sorry, he needs to go away with us for a while. It’s for his own good. He’ll be like a new person soon. Let him go if you love him.”

Maybe the Islanders aren’t the best team around. But there’s such hope for them. They’re building up. They’re getting better. There are good years ahead of them. To think that it all could be taken away, that they’ll get their shit together somewhere else, with other fans cheering them on in a new arena in a new city with a new name, well, that breaks my heart. 

We’re spending these summer days in limbo, not sure if we’re going to still be The Home of the Islanders. We can plead and beg and try to convince the naysayers. But the ultimatum has already been given. Come the evening of August 1, 2011 we will know if our tenuous relationship will come to an end and we’ll join the legions of other sports fans who have suffered through a team breakup. It will be weird to spend the next three years giving ourselves to the team, knowing that when the 2015 season ends, so does our time together.

I can only hope the residents of Nassau County do the right thing and keep the Islanders here. Yea, it’s the economy, stupid. But it’s also hockey. Which means it’s also our hearts.

[AP photo of the Baltimore Colts leaving town in the middle of the night]

I owe my love of sports to my mother. It’s an unusual thing, as most parent-child sports bonding stories are father related, but my father is a Mets fan and my mother was going to see to it that her daughter did not meet that same fate. So I was raised a Yankee fan, learning the fine art of gloating under the tutelage of my mother and my grandfather. 

When there wasn’t baseball, there was hockey. The New York Islanders became a fixture in our lives in 1972. My father wasn’t really into hockey but my mother became obsessed with the sport and I followed suit. By the time the Isles grew into a championship team I was at the age when a mother-daughter relationship usually deteriorates into something along the lines of “You’re 18. Why are you still living here?” Hockey—and a winning team—kept our ties strong.

A few days ago I was talking to my son—who is a New York Rangers fan despite my best efforts to steer him right—about the dynasty years of the Islanders.

“That’s old time hockey, mom.”
“No. Old time hockey is Eddie Shore.”
“The 80s were 30 years ago. Face it. It’s old time hockey.”

I know he’s right. I have a tendency to live in the past when it comes to the NHL. The 80s were a great time for hockey. It was a different game then. Men were men and hockey players didn’t wear helmets and if your team was playing the Flyers, you could expect at least one bench-clearing brawl. My mother - normally not one to condone violence - raised me to believe a hockey game wasn’t complete until someone got a game misconduct. I miss the fights. I miss players climbing into the stands. I miss Dave Schultz. I miss the Patrick Division I even miss Ron Duguay’s hair.

I tell this all to my son. 

“You don’t really miss that stuff,” he says. “You’re just being nostalgic for when Islanders were a good team. Remember that? Good times, right?”  I send him to his room.

He’s right, again. I miss those days. When I talk about how I long for the days of the Campbell Conference and the Hartford Whalers and Dave Semenko, I’m really saying I long for the days when my team was a dynasty. I’m that person. I’m the “Well, the Yankees have 27 World Series wins” person of hockey. 

Perhaps I’m living in the past because the future of the Islanders is so uncertain. There’s a chance the team could be leaving Long Island soon, taking with them any chance of giving their fans a more recent victory to cling to. 

I don’t even talk about the subject of the Islanders leaving with my mother. She doesn’t want to discuss it. That doesn’t stop my son from bringing it up, though.

“So grandma, when the Islanders leave are you going to become a Rangers fan?”
“I’d sooner root for the Mets,” she says.

None of us can see that. Then again, none of us can see this Island without its hockey team. The thing that kept the tenuous relationship I had with my mother in my early 20s from breaking might be going the way of the Minnesota North Stars and the Quebec Nordiques. 

Sometimes we get really nostalgic and we’ll go on YouTube looking for clips of Clark Gillies punching out Eddie Hospodar. We remember the good times we shared over hockey games. Sure, we can share some good times with the Islanders now. It’s just not the same when your team isn’t winning. Or when they are threatening to leave.

We’ve made a secret pact to become Winnipeg Jets fans if they do.