An excerpt from our latest issue, The Fake News Issue!
It’s been a stressful season for the New York Islanders, the renowned hockey team known for playing hockey similarly to other teams. In a development which proved shocking to fans everywhere, moving the team and forcing them to play in the middle of a Brooklyn bar and concert venue -- the Barclays Center -- was not as positive an experience as everyone and anyone could have expected. This is not the end for Everyone’s Favorite Team When Every Other Sport is Off-Season, though. With rumors that the team could move to Queens, or possibly even the seventh circle of hell – Staten Island – fans across both Nassau and Suffolk counties aren’t holding their breath for positive news any time soon.
Up-and-coming businessman and my favorite blood-related uncle, Dominick A. Vito, might have just the answer, though. As it so happens, he came into a piece of property that is mere minutes from the Islanders’ old place, the Nassau Coliseum. And, according to sources close to the situation, the place is “friggin’ yuge.”
With amenities such as alcohol, my dad’s awesome jokes, semi-cold running water, and a pretty flat floor, what else could the team need for their new home? Uncle Dom even got that smell out of the carpet, so now it’s clean and fresh and ready for the blood of our least-skilled players, especially now that the other blood is gone. It just takes some seltzer; it really wasn’t that big of a deal. Have you met my uncle? If you have, you get it. He’s a hard-working man. I say that as a reporter, so now it’s a fact.
Angelo D. Vito, my dad and long-time bar-regular, gave a ringing endorsement of the establishment. “Little Dommy was never very good with the girls, but he’s got Miller on tap, so we all know who really came out on top.”
“Women!” continued the lone patron who is, just to reiterate, the father to a woman who is me. “Who needs em?”
Disgustingly, critics of my uncle’s plan have said that the team needs “a stadium”, and “seats” in their new home. Others, though, such as my uncle and his brother, see this as an example of Big Hockey trying to hurt the average fan.
“Remember back in the day when the average boy could go from playing in the streets to beating up the opposite team for millions of dollars a day? I want that shit in my bar,” said the younger of the Vito brothers, the one that’s my uncle. Objectively speaking, he makes a good point. Those days of opportunity – the opportunity for a young white man to break another man’s collarbone and be celebrated, rather than to be forcibly removed from the Roosevelt Field Mall – are over unless we support businessmen like my uncle, who have proven time and time again that they are the true lifeblood of Long Island.
“Hey, Rangers suck,” Uncle Dom whispers, almost to himself. “Strong Island.”
Strong Island indeed.