Eventually, the Islanders are going to find their Rob Carpenter, their Bob Nevin, their Bobby Thomson. Sooner or later, there will be deliverance, and the drought will be over and done with, the millstone around the franchise’s neck will be removed and tossed into the East River.
Maybe it will be John Tavares.
Maybe it will be Thomas Greiss.
And maybe they can start the process of tying the past in a tight knot Wednesday night and lugging it to the curb, where the garbage collectors can take it and destroy it. You can accumulate a lot of debris, a lot of detritus over 23 years, after all, which is the last time the Islanders won a postseason series.
Eventually, someone will help to haul it away.
Maybe this is the time for a perfect kind of spring cleaning.
“I don’t find any pressure,” Islanders coach Jack Capuano said last week, before this series with the Florida Panthers started. “It takes a lot of luck, a lot of health and a lot of goaltending to get by another round. We just want to play well and give it the best shot that we can and know that when this series is over, you look in the mirror and know you gave it everything you had. That’s all you can ask for your guys.”
Well, that, and to have someone step up and say — even without saying it —
“Enough.” It happens to every team. It’s happened to every team in New York. You get into ruts, and droughts, and dry spells. Even the best of them do. Did you know the Mets never have had as long a wait between postseason wins (13 years is their longest) as the Yankees (15)? That the Jets’ (14) isn’t near as long as the Giants’ (23)?
It can happen to anyone. The years pile up, and they become decades. Hey, it was this same Islanders franchise that once upon a time set a standard of playoff excellence that almost certainly will never be touched. From 1980-1984, the Islanders won 19 straight playoff series. No one else ever has done that in any sport.
So maybe they were due.
But this due?
When David Volek beat Penguins goalie Tom Barrasso with a slap shot from the right circle at 5 minutes and 16 seconds of overtime on May 14, 1993, he sealed a 4-3 win and a 4-3 series victory for the Isles over the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions. That was 23 years ago. That was 8,377 days ago.
And the Isles haven’t won a postseason series since.
The football Giants went through this once. Forced to play a tie breaker with the Browns on Dec. 21, 1958, to determine a champion of the NFL’s Eastern Division, they held Jim Brown to 8 yards on seven carries to win 10-0 and earn a spot in what we now call the greatest game in pro football history a week later against the Colts. They wouldn’t win another postseason game until Carpenter gained 161 yards and Scott Brunner passed for three touchdowns exactly 23 years and six days later.
The Rangers? They once went 21 years without a playoff win, that famine finally ending in 1971 when Nevin scored a goal 9:07 into overtime of Game 6 to beat Toronto at Maple Leaf Gardens. The baseball Giants once ruled New York as the Yankees would, but it took Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World to end an 18-year tour of the deep baseball wilderness.
Every team except the Devils — who, relatively speaking, only have been here for 15 minutes — has suffered through a protracted dry spell. When you’re in the middle of one, you wonder if you ever can escape. But when you’re close to the door — when you’re the Mets in the 16th inning of the ’86 NLCS (after 13 years) or the Jets trying to come back against the Bengals in the first round of the ’82 NFL playoffs (after 14) … well, maybe you allow yourselves to believe.
Maybe the Islanders allowed you to believe last year, when they twice led the Capitals in a first-round series and finally succumbed in Game 7. And maybe it stung when it didn’t happen. But it had to fortify you with a belief that the end is coming, even if it wasn’t necessarily at hand. A win Wednesday won’t get it done, not yet. But it brings you that much closer to the doorstep.
Twenty-three years isn’t forever, it just seems that way. Twenty-three years ago most Internet was AOL, and you paid through the nose for it by the hour. Twenty-three years ago most cell phones looked like Gordon Gekko’s. Twenty-three years ago “Groundhog Day” was the No. 1 movie in America.
Twenty-three years ago Volek beat Barrasso, and the Islanders beat the Penguins, and it felt like the Isles were at the start of a new epoch, not an epic drought.
It can speed by in an awful hurry.