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Bittersweet season for Islanders fans

Team playing its last games at Coliseum

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The NHL season is barely three weeks old, and for loyal New York Islanders fans, it is just the beginning of a very sentimental period. The hockey team, which began play on Long Island in 1972, will be moving from Nassau Coliseum to the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn next year.

It’s the last season at the Coliseum, and the last opening day came and went on Oct. 11, when a packed house watched the team defeat the Carolina Hurricanes. Many local fans from Wantagh and Seaford were there, and plan to be there throughout the season which ends in April but could go longer if the team makes the playoffs.

Craig Richardson, a 1988 graduate of Seaford High School, said he started going to games regularly as soon as he could drive. The 44-year-old said he has been a fan since he was a little kid. As an adult, he created the Facebook page, New York Islanders Hard Core, a forum for fans.

When the Islanders had their dynasty years, winning four consecutive Stanley Cups beginning in 1980, his mother took him and his friends to every parade down Hempstead Turnpike. “I remember them vividly,” he said. “They were some of the best years of my life.”

Patrick Calabria, who has lived in Seaford since 1988, covered the Islanders for Newsday during those Cup years, and would later go on to become the team’s vice president of communications, a post he held during some leaner times in the 1990s.

“It was a very exciting time for the team,” he said of the dynasty years, “and it was a very exciting time for Long Island. It was a very different era. The Coliseum was a terrific building to watch hockey in. It wasn’t in the state of disrepair it is now.”

For the better part of two decades, Islanders owners have been trying to renovate or replace the Coliseum, to no avail. The Lighthouse development plan created by current owner Charles Wang never came to fruition, and a vote that would have publicly financed a new arena failed in 2011. Eventually, he decided to move the team to the new arena in Brooklyn, which was built for the Nets basketball team, which moved from New Jersey.

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