Great story about that Bates penalty shot game. I was (and still do) live in Orlando, but there was no way after having season tickets through the down years of the late 80s and early 90s that I was going to miss that series. So I bought tickets for my dad and I for games 3 & 4 and we were going to fly up. But something came up and he couldn't go, so I ended up taking a friend of mine who's a diehard Ranger fan to game 4.
He will never admit it, to this day, but when Bates scored, he was jumping up and down and screaming his lungs out, caught up in the excitement. The building was, literally, shaking. Plaster was coming down off the ceiling.
That goal was all those years of frustration, all the years of disappointment, all of the heartache, washed away for at least one night. Hempstead Turnpike sounded like we'd won a Cup with all the "Let's Go Islanders!" honking.
That night, for the first time in years, everyone on the Island was an Islander fan.