For once, green was the wrong color to wear on St. Patrick’s Day.
In Patrick Roy’s debut behind the bench, the Islanders snapped a four-game losing streak in front of their home crowd, beating the Stars 3-2 in overtime on Bo Horvat’s game-winner.
It was far from a perfect 60 minutes — a lot of the same issues that have plagued the Isles all year were still very much evident, with a terrible second period silencing a crowd that had chanted Roy’s name inside the game’s first minute.
By the end of the third, though, the Isles had the fans back in their corner.
With the win, the Isles leaped back into fourth in the Metropolitan Division, hopping the Capitals and Devils.
New coach, new life, new season.
Down 2-1 in the third and without nearly enough energy in the building, the Islanders finally got on the forecheck and got a result.
After Kyle Palmieri won the puck, Hudson Fasching tipped in Noah Dobson’s shot from the point, tying the game at the 5:23 mark of the period.
That served not just to inject life into the building but into the team.
Enough to get the game into overtime. And enough to win in overtime, with Horvat roofing a backhand past Scott Wedgewood to start the Roy Era off right.
The start of the game, if anything, looked a lot like Friday’s loss in Chicago.
The Islanders coughed up a pile of early chances and squandered the bulk of possession time, but scored on their first shot of the night when Alexander Romanov beat Wedgewood off the rush.
And if that was bad, the second was worse, as the defensive-zone issues that had plagued the Islanders under Lane Lambert came back in vogue.
With the Isles holding a 1-0 lead, Julien Gauthier got out of position to allow Jason Robertson to maneuver the puck between his legs and roof it from the low slot, tying the game at 11:35.
Less than five minutes later, Nils Lundkvist gave the Stars the lead with a shot from the right point that trickled through Ilya Sorokin’s pads.
It was a major unforced error for the goaltender, but one that came during a game in which the Islanders had repeatedly asked him to bail them out.
Two points does not cloud the fact that Roy has his work cut out for him.
After talking in the morning about how poorly the Islanders rated in analytics related to possession time, needing to fix the team’s breakouts and wanting to focus on defense, Roy watched his new team spend too much of the game without the puck, break out poorly and continue to put too much on Sorokin’s shoulders thanks to a defensive-zone structure that remained lacking.
Those are problems that won’t be fixed overnight.
And the lack of energy for the first 40 minutes under a new coach counted as pretty alarming unto itself.
For much of the night, the most energetic person was Roy himself.
Even behind the bench, he became a show of his own — pacing, shouting, clapping, getting in 10,000 steps over a 20-foot length.
But a win is a win, and a comeback win under the new boss feels pretty good for a team that needed something to cheer about.
By the end of the night, that’s what the Islanders got.
St. Patrick’s Day in blue and orange.
St. Patrick’s Day in January.
St. Patrick’s Day on Long Island.